intelliderp
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13564440
Arguments often encountered:
* Compensation/mobility is good enough not to need unions. * Workers don't have enough leverage to do anything anyway. * Unions restrict you in undesirable ways. * Unions are shady and corrupt.
I pulled a 5-year-old desktop computer out of storage, bought a new $50 hard drive for it, put my resume on Craigslist (of all places), installed Ruby on Rails and all my development tools, and within two weeks I had a job working from home for $40 an hour. I didn't have to re-certify, renew any licenses, or pay anyone any fees of any kind. I didn't lose access to any tools I relied on in my previous job. My only expense for maintaining my employability was $50. I have a four-year degree only.
I don't know of any other industry where that's possible, and I don't know if it's possible to do that in this industry anymore. I know it is because of the hard work of the open source movement. I've been thinking a lot about how to preserve that level of economic empowerment in software. I don't think the answer is in licenses, but in something like a union (although you are right in that most developers are rabidly anti-union). Perhaps an alternative corporate structure would have the same result, and that's why I decided to start the first for-profit software collective.
It is sourced from a lot of quality data collected by Gallup and the wisdom boils down to 3 practices:
1) Give everyone the tools they need to do the job.
2) Get out of their way.
3) Don't try to force equal performance across your team. You won't achieve it and it will alienate people.
For example: https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-gaza-west-bank-bitcoin-pales...
* To those people who say, "You can't compare crypto to a company because companies pay dividends," that is specifically why I chose Amazon as an example, a stock that does not pay dividends.