"Why am I getting reprimanded?"
"Because you ran a unit test..."
"What is wrong with that?"
"It's Brian's job to press that key, not yours. You violated Union rules"
Ask HN: Why don't developers unionize?
21–30 of 153 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why don't developers unionize?
#22Advocate for those affected by automation? That's like the teamsters advocating for bicycle couriers who lost their jobs to UPS. I don't understand how that would work. Good luck though.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't developers unionize?
#23Part of it is that unions are associated with blue-collar work and developers feel that they are "too white-collar" for that sort of thing. There's no collar boundary to unionization, of course, but there is a perception that there is.
What about actors ? They are unionized.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't developers unionize?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leveraged into poverty? Developer salaries range from 50-65k starting to 250k plus. Then there's freelancing.
Depends on where you're at, right? You'll find tons of developers on Upwork willing to work for less. Isn't that the future for most of us? We're tomorrow's factory workers. Corporations have already shown that they'll work to suppress wages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... The long game is to promote STEM fields and increase supply - pushing down wages and benefits.
Isn't that the future for most of us? We're tomorrow's factory workers.
Speak for yourself. What I do takes a lot more creativity, flexibility, and variety of types of skill than most factory jobs. I intend to continue to develop skills that can't be commoditized.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't developers unionize?
#25Maybe I'm mistaken, but I feel like people unionize when they're being taken advantage of and need to fight for better employment conditions....but developers have it pretty nice, all in all, most of us. I don't feel much incentive to unionize when I'm making $50/hr+ and have unlimited vacation.
Not like that in most of the world I bet. It's not like that where I live.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't developers unionize?
#26I can only speak for myself, but I will never join a union. It's a political thing for me. I know not everyone feels that way, but I also know that I'm not the only one strongly opposed to unionization.
Scab!
Re: Ask HN: Why don't developers unionize?
#27I despise the bullyish behavior of most unions, in fact, the central organization that coordinates them in my country has often been called our "shadow government" due to how they blackmail the state on every issue to take advantage and force them to be wasteful with tax dollars, causing far more damage than what they undo.
I am just a single person, but I wouldn't be caught dead in an union just from what I've seen them do.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't developers unionize?
#28Two big reasons.
#1 Abundant labor, meaning buyers market, so developers don't have leverage. This has a pretty good primer on the topic:
Democracy At Work
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure-Capitalism/dp/...
#2 I'm as pinko commie liberal socialist as they come, and I can't imagine how even the most well intentioned (least alt-factual neo-reactionary libertarian) group of developers can coordinate collectively. Said another way, I can't imagine preventing the free-rider, defector problem.
This book covers the sociology of collective action:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
Maybe, just maybe, there's a unifying issue or policy, like protecting privacy rights, that could motivate most developers to pull in the same direction... Just to throw out an idea as an example.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't developers unionize?
#29When unions are organized, they are interested in improving the workers' positions. Over time, though, they just become one more entity in the workplace, and advocate for their own power and money over all else. It is a corrosive influence that starts out ok, but degrades to a very low common denominator, and puts a company on the ropes. There is no better example of this than detroit.
Re: Ask HN: Why don't developers unionize?
#30Because things are good now. Developers are making decent salaries. In most cases far better than their friends who chose other career paths.
But I don't think it will always be this way. With the rise of bootcamps and the influx of new developers we're going to see over the next 15 years, thanks to all of today's kids learning to code, I think developers are at serious risk of becoming commoditized. I see a future where a developer is paid the salary of a retail cashier and it scares me.