Tech workers are organizing and demanding democracy in the workplace • Hacker News Board

Re: Tech workers are organizing and demanding democracy in the workplace

#51

Post by spamizbad » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:28 PM UTC

The relative ease of finding employment shouldn't factor into your desire to unionize. In fact, quite the contrary: It's less difficult to organize when you're the strongest.

But more importantly, these are the "halcyon" days of finding tech work, and they are fleeting. There is absolutely no guarantee the job market will look this promising in a few years. Things seemed to be on an endless upward trajectory in the 90s and then it all came crashing down.

If you're gambling on the fact that tech work will always be in extremely high demand, then you have a combination of risk appetite and optimism that makes for a founder.

As someone who worked through the period of the tech industry during the dotcom fallout, lots of stuff people take for granted today was non-existent: You had much less autonomy over the technical aspects of the objectives you were trying to achieve. Mandated tools, crappy underpowered computers, bureaucracy, over project dependencies, process-heavy SDLCs weren't just the norm, but widely viewed as the proper way to build software. It was all a reaction to what was seen as the "inmates running the asylum" during the dotcom boom. It basically took a bunch of promising startups in the mid-aughts to start cleaning people's clocks and become juggernauts to get the broader industry to reverse course. It also became a lot cheaper to do a tech startup.

Basically, understand that a lot of what is enjoyable today about working in tech is a side-effect of supply-and-demand; they HAVE to avoid developer-hostile actions because we're difficult to hire and expensive to employ. Once that's no longer the case, the screws are going to tighten. Just look at China's 9-9-6 work policies and companies using chat tools to spy on their employees to keep them working as a point of reference.

> As an engineer you don't make those decisions, you just implement them.

I'd like to think we have enough integrity as a profession to fall back on an Eichmann-adjacent justification.

Re: Tech workers are organizing and demanding democracy in the workplace

#52

Post by milquetoastaf » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:29 PM UTC

Professional actors and actresses can also be in-demand and are often 'recruited' constantly for different projects. They get paid sometimes millions of dollars.

They're in a union

Re: Tech workers are organizing and demanding democracy in the workplace

#53

Post by newen » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:29 PM UTC

How would unions reduce your ability to choose between jobs? How are these two things even related?

Re: Tech workers are organizing and demanding democracy in the workplace

#54

Post by gorpomon » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:30 PM UTC

>> As an engineer you don't make those decisions, you just implement them. Don't like the decisions, go somewhere else. Want more/total control over decision making? Start your own company.

Don't you want more out of the roles in your career? I want to work at a place that wants my best self, ideas, opinions and all. I don't want my only career options to be a paid typist or an entrepreneur.

Re: Tech workers are organizing and demanding democracy in the workplace

#55

Post by hellisothers » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:30 PM UTC

And this is a straw man, we’re talking about labor unions not Marxism.

Re: Tech workers are organizing and demanding democracy in the workplace

#56

Post by helen___keller » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:32 PM UTC

> I continue to believe that tech workers enjoy a temporary position of immense leverage in the workplace, but turning that into substantive gains has so far proven beyond anyone's capacity

I agree strongly. My generation (millennials) often look with disdain at how easy the baby boomers had it, often paying off their college tuition by taking on just a summer job.

I think my future children (or maybe their children) will look with disdain at how easy software engineers had it. Imagine that you get a degree and train for a job, without a particular position of power, and just like that you have leverage and a growing salary that you can increase 30% every time you switch jobs! Just from the scarcity of your skills!

Re: Tech workers are organizing and demanding democracy in the workplace

#57

Post by linuxftw » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:32 PM UTC

> What I took from that is tech workers have an incredible choice in where they can go work because their skills are highly in-demand. So why unionize?

These things are not diametrically opposed.

A union doesn't imply anything other than collective bargaining. Maybe having a union would prevent things like Disney firing a bunch of full time employees after they retrain contractor replacements. This type of nonsense is driving down wages for the entire middle class of workers.

Re: Tech workers are organizing and demanding democracy in the workplace

#58

Post by scarmig » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:34 PM UTC

A country with a right of exit can still be quite authoritarian, just as an organization that you can leave can be as well. What's authoritarian is the structure: owners and especially managers nowadays controlling priorities and work rules, as opposed to the people actually doing the labor in companies. I'd generally opt for all those parties collaborating in decision making.

> don't try to use the club of government to change an existing for-profit, shareholder-controlled company into what you want it to be, just because you want it.

Do you think existing corporate management structures don't rely on state violence to maintain themselves? If a bunch of workers enacted control over their workplace, do you think shareholders would be the ones coming in and cracking heads, or government agents?

You're simply defining your narrow conception of property rights and economic organization to be the Right and Natural Way for Things to Be, and you choose to not see the club of government used to enforce it.

Re: Tech workers are organizing and demanding democracy in the workplace

#59

Post by return0 » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:34 PM UTC

Same reason we dont live in shared houses, i suppose

Re: Tech workers are organizing and demanding democracy in the workplace

#60

Post by durnygbur » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:35 PM UTC

Once you discover later on in your career that seniority and respect of your peers is not transferable between companies, that hopping to the next job from the job board is vicious circle of working on dull dead end projects under authocratic and dumb at times people (with long length of service at the company), you might change your mind. Also you’ll discover that life is more complicated than „just walk away or start your own business”, at times neither of these is possible or even both of these are straight suicidal.