The people who lose out the most are those doing important but relatively well defined jobs- the factory laborer, highly scripted call center worker, the warehouse picker. They can capture a lot more through collective action because while they can easily be replaced individually losing them en masse is catastrophic.

We're not very good at negotiating as individual professionals, and we're being taken advantage of on a massive scale.

Unions won't eliminate the problem of non-technical people running engineering departments and deciding salaries-- they will simply put a non-technical union negotiator in there.

This will make it worse because companies do actually compete not to lose engineering talent right now... but if your only option is another union shop where you'll make exactly the same wage, you become a commodity.

Unions commoditize workers.

http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap20p4.html

>http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap20p4.html

That link is just terrible. It makes no intelligent argument and presents no evidence of anything. It's drivel. If you think there's an intelligent argument in there, please let me know.

Meanwhile, here's a reason that corporations in corrupt states actively try to stop unions, and it's not because they think that worker wages are too low.

What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour.

It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment. In the long run, the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.

... and on for a bit (as Smith is wont to do).

An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes Of the Wealth Of Nations

Chapter VIII. Of the Wages Of Labour

The produce of labour constitutes the natural recompence or wages of labour.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#link2H...

Can't upvote this enough.

Your point is...?

It's funny to see this idea repeated throughout this thread that we're all special snowflakes that can negotiate better deals on our own.

Even more funny if you look back at the many threads about negotiating salary and see the huge number of people on HN that never even negotiate initial offers but just accepts what they're handed.

My own experience is that some of us can negotiate outstanding deals, but from managing teams for the last 20 years and being part of salary negotiations and ranking developers for most of that, in almost every company I've worked, I've seen seen software staff get lumped together in big buckets of (from the company's perception) entirely interchangeable developers and set raises across whole blocks, with the only salary differences generally being banded by narrowly by position other than for a tiny (5%-10%) portion of top performances.

Odds are you are a commodity to your employer in terms of salary and performance.

At every company I've ever worked at or gotten an offer from, salary was effectively non-negotiable, because HR set the rules of The Band and the Rules were the Rules, which the hiring managers simply had to abide by. Occasionally I've been able to extract a hiring bonus or something relatively minor like that, but the insistence with which they stick to the salary is mind-boggling.

It got really absurd at my last job, where I was co-lead on the most profitable team in the company and a "10x" developer: I got an offer for much more money elsewhere, so I regretfully (I really liked that job) sent in my resignation. They asked me why, I told them it was honestly too much money to pass up. My "people" manager, project manager, and a senior manager fought hard to get me a counteroffer. They escalated all the way to the VP of HR, a direct report of the CEO. The final response was "no, he can't have that, that would be out of band, and he can't move out of the band yet because his degree + years of experience doesn't equal x." This materially affected the company. One of our clients in particular was a little paranoid and I had developed a great working relationship with them - when I left, they effectively put in a stop work for months until they were satisfied my replacements understood the system as well as I did. (Which I don't believe was necessary; they were not as good, but they were and are good enough, but the guy was really paranoid. Perhaps understandably, since bugs would have directly led to financial mishaps.)

But in general the band system saves companies money, so they stick with it.

Of course there are plenty of exceptions - things are obviously different in startups, for example, where HR might not even exist, and plenty of companies don't give HR so much power.

This is an extremely dangerous myth.

Markets don't care how hard it is to define a job, how hard it is to do a job, or anything else of the sort. They care about supply/demand. If the supply of a certain kind of labor is too high, pay falls until enough people leave to restore supply/demand balance. It's that simple.

Example: chemists. It's an occupation that demands tons of creativity and is very hard to pin down, but the career prospects are shit. Why? We train more of them than industry needs.

> Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

And apparently every programmer sees himself as a cunning negotiator, and irreplaceable genius 1000x-er.

We are collectively shooting ourselves in the foot.

I've never given an offer I wouldn't have been ok with upping 30% or more, and conversely I have never taken an offer I haven't negotiated up 30% or more. And I don't see myself as a cunning negotiator - if I had been, I probably would have been far better off.

But I do negotiate, which is something, by experience from the other side of the table, nearly nobody does.

I predict a lot of pizza's boxes around the office. And you working remotely like mad while ill or from the beach/sky resort. A lot of screaming, too. :)

Not all of us are that lucky to have incompetent managers that allow that situation to play out.

But this still ignores the larger problem. Highly skilled workers as a class are still not receiving their fair market rate compensation because we cannot negotiate as a whole.

Your base pay should be much higher than it is and should allow you better opportunities for higher pay in negotiations.

If you're in the Bay Area or Wall St tribal units, the numbers are higher, but they are higher for a reason... Your expenses or costs are way higher.

Everyone is replaceable. If you are the keeper of the keys of some magical system, you'll be replaced with the system when you become a liability, unless your employer is a moron.

I'd like to point out that having a moron for an employer, and in fact, a passle of morons in management is not a far fetched scenario.... I'd go so far as to say it's somewhat regular.

Don't believe me? Just ask the average employee:)

Then you'll find yourself as the guy with 10 years of managing a OpenVMS legacy system in 2015!

We seem to think that, if it will cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for us to leave, we're in charge. Not really. Companies will cut of their noses to spite their faces. No one is indispensable.

Yeah this happens all the time.

It is always weird to me when you have people who are staunchly libertarian/free-market who seem to assume companies and consumers are perfectly rational actors (which is the only way a lot of the theory they are so fond has a chance of working without outside regulation). I just want to shake them and ask them if they are even paying attention to... anything.

Every single one of us has flaws that can be exploited (on purpose or just by coincidence) to cause us to act unreasonably in some situations... even when we're fully aware of this fact and actively trying to correct for it.

Being reasonable even just most of the time is difficult work given all of the essentially hardwired flaws we are working against.