Uh, I'm pretty sure the best employees in any field are worth 10x what the worst employees are, whether you're writing code, assembling a car or gutting fish.
The economics of labour suggest unions are most valuable where there's a monopsony buyer of labour. Big Tech might fit that bill, especially when we know they colluded to depress salaries.
Have you considered there's more to being a pilot than landing the plane?
A lot of people seem to be measuring value in landings per day, widgets per minute, lines of code per week without acknowledging that the quality of work does have an impact.
Look at salary differences.
Curious about this. I'd have thought going the civilian route of flight school should put one on equal footing on this regard? Or are you saying that just statistically more long-tenured pilots are retired military?
Have you worked on an assembly line? I have.
You may not add value by doing it faster, but you certainly cause problems if you do it slower.
But I didn't say that, and I don't agree.
I think the 90th percentile never causes delays on a particular station, while the median may cause a few per hour, and the 10th percentile might delay every 2nd or 3rd cycle.
There are tangible costs associated with those levels of performance.
The above poster takes the position that the ratio between the maximum value, and minimum employable value is less than 10.
This makes his point though. There is no capacity to be 10x more productive.
However I know of assembly lines where things spend several hours at each station. The people (often as many as 10 people per station) all work together for that time putting different parts on. If you can do the job faster than the time in station you can take an extra break to do what you want. Such lines are generally planned so that if you work as expected you get a 20 minute break when the lines move, most teams work faster and get a 30 minute break, almost never does some team get less than the 20 minute break planned.
The car model assembly line is the most efficient, but it has high costs. When you make a lot of something it is well worth those costs, but if you are only expecting to sell 100 "things" per year it isn't worth setting up the line.
The same divide/conquer tactic was done 100 years ago when owners of mines in Pennsylvania pitted white and black miners against each other.
The actual distinction doesn't matter to the owners provided it divides labor. Anything that makes you feel special and separates you from people in the same boat as you is fair game - whether that's the intellectual needs of your job or just plain old racism.
In code on the other hand, your best employee can straight up do things your worst employee can't. The differences are much larger. There is a reason people hire Principal Software Engineers, but most IC roles in other fields don't have the same range of seniorities.
Those are the stories he told me about working in a factory, and frankly the lessons I learned from him were just as valuable as any "fifteen lessons for software architects" books our industry has produced. Sure — software is unique! So is food, so is metal, so is film, so is concrete…
People don't deserve unions because they're 10x workers. People deserve unions because they're workers.
I've worked at FedEx as a package handler before. That is absolutely not the case there. The absolutely best employees might be 3x more productive than someone who's mediocre with 2 weeks of experience. When the job is picking up boxes off of a conveyor belt and putting them in trucks, your walking speed is one of the key limiters. And no one can walk 10x faster than someone else. Not for a 6-8 hr shift.
Some jobs - especially jobs that involve heavy manual labor - just don't have a wide range between the most and least productive employees.
Obviously we're all just throwing around numbers to make a point, this isn't hard data.
But I assure you there are zero jobs where there is no difference between the best and worst employees. Zero.
A “10x” engineer is worth a compounding amount more than their peers.
I don’t think that holds for every field.
So yeah, if you're an absolute genius, you don't need a union. Everybody else does. Your common people colleagues do.
They optimize for equality, which necessarily hurts the highest performers (in one way or another) and benefits the lower ones (in many ways)
Like anything, it’s a trade off
Or presumably anything else (because you said "any field"). But why?
It seems like the less skill or expertise something takes the less ability there is to deviate from the average. In which case unions, if most useful for low-skilled labor like OP described, are most useful for industries that tend to outsource their labor to other countries. And thus reduces the need for unions. Seems consistent with the decline of unions in the US.
This is a big misconception. The difference is whether 10x talent is more valuable than 1x talent. You could be the worlds best fish gutter, but if you can't gut 10x more fish than the next guy, then your salary is capped and you're wasting your talent. In software, you can be 10x more productive than the next guy.
Routinely on this site, there are job postings for "senior" engineering roles for that do not require even 5 years of experience. (By contrast, the recent headlines about UPS drivers making $170k are for drivers with 5+ years of tenure.) By and large, our industry as a whole does not place a huge value on long experience.
> When no one does anything better than anyone else, it makes sense to negotiate as a block, individuals have no power.
How much power did the individual employees at Meta, Google, etc. have when they were being laid off en masse recently?
They do not make 170k, that was a puff piece from UPS. That number was total compensation + monetary value of all benefits. Which not the way most people/postings talk about compensation.
This is a tech site. People in tech routinely include the value of e.g. RSUs in compensation numbers. Point taken, but a) it's not too far afield from how tech comp is discussed and b) even if you back out the non-cash components, the drivers still make a lot of money. (Possibly more even than the median US software developer.)
Looks like UPS quotes above 95k avg, and 42$/hr avg after 4 years. I have no idea how that compares to average tech salary, but I agree that it is good money.
That last thing worth mentioning, also from UPS' site is that almost half of their full-time drivers have been at the company for >15 years. That's a long time.
[0]: https://about.ups.com/us/en/our-company/great-employer/real-...
First cut at this would be $23k of pension, plus health insurance. (Average policy for a family of 4 is running around $25k; UPS may have a better plan than average.) It's fair for them to include these because comparable employers do not include either. (Though it make the compare to tech workers less direct.)
> almost half of their full-time drivers have been at the company for >15 years
There's a documented correlation between good benefits, low turnover, and higher profits.
It is fair, but not under the phrase "UPS workers make". That phrasing usually only refers to (pre- or post-tax) salary.
> There's a documented correlation between good benefits, low turnover, and higher profits.
I would believe it. All I meant to say is that the 95k average salary will be skewed by having half their full time employees being there for >15 years.
I think you and I agree for the most part, I am pushing to keep a clearer distinction between take home pay and total compensation.
I agree, but even this is squishy. For example; pension benefits eventually are taken home by the employee.
As indicated above, most blue-collar jobs don't carry similar benefits. Totally fair to include in the TC number. It's also a higher percentage of notional wages for the specific type of job. Health insurance premiums for a family of 4 are averaging approximately $10/hr; it would be silly not to include that in a comp discussion where employees might be looking at other jobs that pay $15/hr.
Again, even backing out the compensation you don't want to call "compensation," these are still very good jobs.
You live under the impression that better workers will earn more.
In practice the skill that earns higher salary is to pretend to be very competent by using jargon and parroting stuff.
Pro sports in general. Netflix said they run their company like a pro sports team, why not include that players have a union?
Sports is different because there’s only a certain number of spots on the field. This changes the dynamics and keeps the crab mentality at bay. The same is not true for most workplaces.
Nobody forced them to hire them?
Remember that people who believe things like this would be in the same union as you, be paid just as well as you thanks to union contracts, and expect you to strike on their behalf. Do you really want to be in solidarity with people like this?
Did you also renounced your citizenship because there was someone you didn't like in your same country?
But taking a view on markets outside of the US and SV/bigtech in particular, those 10x devs aren't usually getting the 2-3x as much, and taking a view of industry in total, profits are runaway but wages are flat and falling, especially when considering inflation.
Capital is winning. Perhaps unions are required. But I'm not a union member and likely never will be.
When hasn't it won in the western world?
(Was that a rhetorical question?)
In the US, post-WW2 until Reagan got elected.
I work in the Atlanta Metro, so it's not like it's a place you think of when you think tech.
There's a well-known plateau in tech wages that affects most tech workers. Look at what your current employer pays people 10 or 20 years older than you for the type of work you do and you will be able to observe the plateau.
> There's a well-known plateau in tech wages that affects most tech workers. Look at what your current employer pays people 10 or 20 years older than you for the type of work you do and you will be able to observe the plateau.
I've been doing this for over 10 years. When is the plateau coming? Even lateral moves for me bump my paid up to whatever market is at the moment. Maybe that's just a 5K bump if i left in a hurry, but it's not like I lost money to inflation with a jump. I demoted myself during the pandemic due to family stuff and even taking a lesser title I still got a pay bump.
I'm still of the opinion that enough money exists, but I just haven't ever experienced that my salary has gone down with a job jump I've experienced meager annual raises and skipped bonuses, but I've never not been reset to market rate however many thousands of dollars that is. I think my record for a salary jump was 40K? I stayed at a jump I liked for like 5 years. Even still, I never felt my lifestyle decrease in those 5 years. I was always paid enough and I remember once there was a 12% raise in there to help that we were too far behind market rates.
Let's approximate a non-plateau career ladder this way:
- 20s: $150k
- 30s: $250k (+ ~65%)
- 40s: $410k (+ ~65%)
- 50s: $670k (+ $65%)
Does this look roughly like the compensation path for median engineers (people who spend most of their time writing code) at your company? If there are not a lot of people there in their 50s, it is likely that they are not paying median engineers with 25+ years of experience $670k. (This hints at the other plateau, which is that very experienced engineers are often pushed out of the field entirely. Would not want to be a 50+ engineer looking for work.)
and a reactionary union isn't really the way to fix "capital winning". Because the idea that capital "wins" is flawed imho. It's not that capital is winning, it's that capital is the part of the equation which has bargaining power.
The reason for that is hard to say, but i am guessing that most workers are not really unique or special enough to warrant having them the same bargaining power as capital. After all, capital is required to establish the job in the first place.
Forcing a union, to prevent capital from "winning" merely makes capital less effective at providing their function - investment and growth of the economy. This makes capital leave.
There’s also the fact that the worst case scenario for a capitalist is that they become an employee. The worst case for an employee is they end up homeless.
Established business shareholders probably do not have this problem.
Actors in the US are in SAG (currently on strike). AFAICT, there is a 'base contract' that most people get ("John Smith as Taxi Driver", "Jane Doe as Waitress #2"), but folks can negotiate above and beyond that ("Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt").
So there's a floor, but no ceiling.
I'm just not interested.
> The best engineers are worth literally 10x the worst engineers
Lots of people will claim to be 10x engineers, few people will claim to be average engineers, even though statistically there are more of the latter. I suspect 80% of engineers think they're in the top 20%. This is bad for solidarity.
(Many of the people likely to face discrimination issues are also at risk of being discriminated against by their union, sadly; it's not an entirely simple solution. Again, poor solidarity.)
> pay proportional to value-add
As we're seeing in the Unity debacle, who gets to capture value is about power rather than simply distributing the total value-add among all those that add value. And power in this case is determined by the "BATNA" for both sides. So long as tech workers are difficult to replace, they already have considerable power.
Corps have been pushing down wages for decades. Here's some methods:
- Offshoring
- Automation
- Skeleton teams
- Long hours
- Removal of bonuses for anyone but managers
- Removal of signing bonuses (this was a thing in the late 90s)
- Recruiters posing mid level people as seniors.
- No or inadequate inflation raises
- Coordinated layoffs (flood the market, hire back what you need at deflated prices)
- Little or no on site skill training (this was also big in the late 90s)
- A few large, entrenched tech companies.
>So long as tech workers are difficult to replace, they already have considerable power.
You may think that, but the phrase, "no one is irreplaceable," and "the graveyard is full of irreplaceable people," is still true. Go piss off your CEO, call him incompetent or something, and see how replaceable you really are. He will ditch you and make everyone else pick up the load.
What that highlights is just how bad the inequality curve really is, that the 0.1% right on one edge have exceptional power to make decisions which make the rest worse off.
What this means is that any tech union is going to have to extend a bit of solidarity out to lower paid and ""lower skilled"" people against whom we have traditionally been snobbish, in order to be successful. See the Hollywood millionares out donating to the rest of their picket lines, for example.
You can't just look "up" the curve at your salary getting ever higher. You have to look "down" as well, without contempt.
> "anyone is replaceable," is still true
Was it Napoleon who said "the graveyards are full of irreplaceable men"? Also true.
What makes you think you aren't worth much, much more? What would happen to your company if all the tech people went on vacation for a month? CEO's don't think, "We make more than 95% of businesses in our industry, I guess we can relax now." We have to act like the CEO of our careers. Also, most tech workers in the US aren't in the top 5% of earners. Unless you are in a high position at a large company, you're probably top 15-25%. Might wanna check.
>Was it Napoleon who said "the graveyards are full of irreplaceable men"? Also true.
I remember Jobs saying it, but he was known for adopting other people's sayings.
>You can't just look "up" the curve at your salary getting ever higher. You have to look "down" as well, without contempt.
Yes, tech people's elitism isn't a beneficial trait. It's good when selling yourself, but once that's done, we should drop it.
FWIW, a tech union, if done right, would probably be the strongest union in history. Think Dune and Ix.
No, I really did check https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-f... before posting that stat.
(I guess this is where Americans start discovering how badly paid the UK as a whole is)
Holy moly. In the US you have to earn just over $240K USD/yr to break the top 5%. At least you don't go bankrupt when it's time for elder care.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/24/how-much-money-you-have-to-e....
No, this is a common misunderstanding. Note that all professional sports have unions for athletes.
The point of labor unions is that no matter how much power you may think an individual worker has, it's always relatively small and vastly surpassed by the power and money of the business ownership.
Except tennis, where players are basically independent contractors—and not coïncidentally they have the lowest average earnings of any major sport:
* https://www.vox.com/videos/2023/9/12/23870760/tennis-wages-s...
And the coincidence that they earn less might have something to do with how nobody can name anyone outside of the top handful of players.
The same can be said of actors, and yet they have a union/guild.
Good point. I guess the big difference is that selling the tennis game itself simply does not bring in the revenues that acting and the NFL does.
Top tennis players earn from brand endorsements, not from simply playing the game.
Terrible example though because professional sports leagues are monopolies.
Bondage and discipline languages are a good example of this. It's typically the main rationale for their advocation, although stated perhaps a bit differently.
It follows quite obviously from the profit motive that companies want to minimize salaries, labour bargaining power and dependence on individuals. These, especially the latter, apply to the "10x" as well.
I will do my best to take this as the result of decades of anti-union sentiment across the USA; in places like Sweden this is not "common knowledge" as it seems to be stated here.
The best counter-examples I can think of, within the US even is: the screen actors guild (which is a union) and the writers guild. Both of which cannot (and definitely do not) represent uniform quality and lack of talent or special skill.
A more accurate mental model is to understand a union as trading some (or most) of your individual negotiating leverage and advancement opportunity out for a collective negotiating structure through the union. You have less opportunity to negotiate and advance on your own, but you would, in theory, get various protections in return.
This does not mean wages go up! In fact, companies are now incentivized to withhold as much compensation as they can get away with so they have room to negotiate in the next round of union talks. You also have to be prepared to strike to force those negotiations, which means giving up your compensation for that period.
Job hopping is huge in the software industry. It’s well known that job hopping is an easy way to get a pay increase when you’re in bad conditions. I would be surprised if software engineers as a whole would accept long strikes and strict compensation structures when they realize they can actually earn more by jumping out of a hypothetical union job where they’re not getting paid due to strikes and the recruiters come calling with job offers that are conveniently for 5-10% more than their union’s demands anyway.
Some, mostly public sector, contracts have union negotiated "wage tables" suggesting pay based on position and individual performance, but similar exist in almost all large organizations. And the unions don't care if someone is paid more than this, and at the moment they wouldn't even know, because individual pay isn't public information.
- Get better at salary negotiation and interviews through having union training - Share how much they earn with other workers, even distributing statistics, reinforcing salary negotiation power and the ability for workers to ensure that businesses doesn't engage in illegal wage fixing - Have union back up when HR are being a pest to protect the company - Ensure that fair severance is distributed when an individual is let go - Negotiate on-call scheduling as a group - Negotiate all other parts of their contract, for example removing pesky no competes - Engage in lobbying
Individuals, even ones with great competence within their field of expertise, have a lot less information regarding the game they're playing with other companies. Unions can help with that.
Note: You can still be in a union without having your workplace be 'unionized' or having a collective agreement with the union. You can still engage in salary negotiations individually, and you may still skip out on being in the workplace's union.
Following up on what you say, the main reason for unions is to help labor extract more of the wealth they create. While I'm sure there are lots of people here who think devs should make more of it, they live pretty comfortably. It'd be like saying doctors should unionize to get a lockstep salary from the hospitals where they work. There might be some marginal benefits to it, no doubt, but they don't as a class seem any more interested in it than devs do.
.. have you actually checked how much power the AMA has, even though they're not technically a "union"?
This year UK doctors went on strike against their monopsony employer because they were getting below-inflation pay rises: https://www.bma.org.uk/our-campaigns/junior-doctor-campaigns...
Actors are unionized.
If you want to see what happens in a collective bargaining system you can come to Sweden. Here the best engineers make about 1.25x what the worst make. Also, everybody makes a lot less than in the US.
> 20% of the field, with 80% of the negotiating power…
In a free market those 20% have 80% of the negotiating power, true. But in a union they only have 20% of the votes. So what will happen? See above.
Absolutely not.
I'm a software engineer in a research & development department (with a headcount of ~200 in an organisation of about 20k). Roles here are very varied, from people with multi-decade experience and very deep specialist technical knowledge to recent graduates, in domains that range from RF engineering to ethnography to project management.
Our union is indispensable, both within our department and across the whole organisation.
Note that the above is how they work best. Unions do work in situations lacking some of the above, but because of that lack there is incentive for someone to leave the union and so they have troubles they must address somehow.
The above mostly lifted from https://pedestrianobservations.com/2016/07/16/public-transit...
edit: Artistic endeavors where people are passionate about the work to the point where they can be exploited are an excellent place for unions. Within computing the obvious comparative is the gaming industry. The "EA Spouse" scandal in the '00s demonstrated how much people were willing to destroy themselves to get into the gaming industry, and how an employer could abuse that passion.
If you consider nothing more important than your own individual compensation, and have absolute faith in your own irreplaceable genius, it’s easy to make a case against unions — sort of like “there is no prisoner’s dilemma, why would I ever cooperate?”
The idea of a tech union could simply be establishing the very basics. The expectations of the folks I know in the industry include more than 40 hour weeks, significant unpaid overtime during "crunch" periods. Managers promising the world to clients without even consulting the devs. Illegitimate H1-B hiring, and unspoken threats to H1-B workers when they are voluntold to do extra, unpaid work.
Again, I understand the hesitancy, but a tech union could be much more akin to the Screen Actors Guild, where the vast majority of the negotiation is about how the lowest-ranking get a fair shake, while the superstars barely notice the union. The benefits to the superstars, however, are obvious. When you have major players on record of egregious crimes of illegal non-competes a decade ago, which probably cost the superstars literally millions of dollars each over their careers, I would hope they would want to be on board too.
Unions can suck. They don't have to suck. I would think a bunch of habitually online, highly-skeptical, analytic, and systemic-focused folks like us could actively make them not suck.
SAG-AFTRA (the big acting union) blows that argument out of the water. The disparity in compensation between the SAG extras and the big name stars can be several orders of magnitude. Their union works great, as it's mostly about dictating labor-favorable working conditions and contract terms.
There are all sorts of things that the vast majority of software developers could get behind that we often don't see eye-to-eye with management about. Flexible working hours, having blocks of interruption-free time, on-call sucks, etc.
For THERSITES & Co., for the weakly and small,
Who in free competition must go to the wall,
The plan of PROCRUSTES has obvious charms:
"Cut 'em down to our standard, chop legs, shorten arms!
Bring us all to one level in power and pay,
By the rule of a legalised Eight Hours Day!"Or ports are a good non-public example, it's hard to "disrupt" a port. To the extent that industry is competitive, unions would basically destroy their companies... Big 3 automakers are a great example.
Now compare that to tech where the 80/20 rule is patently obvious to anyone in the field. The best engineers are worth literally 10x the worst engineers, but often get paid only 2-3x as much. 20% of the field, with 80% of the negotiating power, wants employers to find better and better ways to pay proportional to value-add, not to increase the floor salary, or working conditions across the board.