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Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

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Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#251

Post by iteria »

runako wrote: post #120
iteria wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that true? I am only a dataset of one, but while my wage at a job may not rise quickly, my raise at a job jump rockets up. We can say that employers should reward employees who stay, but in an industry where getting your next job is trivial (in my experience anyway), I just say sucks to be those companies when I take my institutional knowledge with me. Also it's been my experience that remote work has put real pre…

> my wage at a job may not rise quickly, my raise at a job jump rockets up 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.

> > my wage at a job may not rise quickly, my raise at a job jump rockets up

> 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.

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#252

Post by runako »

nonethewiser wrote: post #234
runako wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

It includes health insurance premiums and stuff paid by the employer. No one uses that for TC.

> health insurance premiums and stuff paid by the employer.

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.

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#253

Post by M2Ys4U »

zaphar wrote: post #218
afavour wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> community support structure ...what do you think a union is? I feel as though you're imagining the Big Bad Union that big companies love to describe. A union can be in whatever form you wish it to be. If software engineers wish to band together to form a union solely to improve their health insurance then they could just do that.

I don't get to pick unions. I get to pick my community support structures. Who I marry, which church,friend group,local community group I join? Those are all voluntary. Unions are not voluntary so they can't really be a community support group in the sense I mean.

>I don't get to pick unions.

>Unions are not voluntary

Not all of my colleagues are in a union, and some of those that are are in a different union to me (albeit a minority of them). It works.

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#254

Post by fragmede »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #226
Jensson wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People voted not to have a union, so apparently democracy doesn't get you what you want, at least in your case.

In most states in the US you are not required to join the union if your workplace votes for it

For better or worse, closed shop (where a company hires only union members) was outlawed in the US by the Taft–Hartley Act in 1947.

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#255

Post by bjornsing »

mplanchard wrote: post #73
alphazard wrote: post #22

Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little? I'm thinking about low skilled jobs that can be mastered in months or years. Unions create salary progression, and benefits for seniority where there is otherwise no reason for them to exist. When no one does anything better than anyone else, it makes sense to negotiate as a block, individuals have no power. Now compa…

In addition to the writers’ and actors’ unions, many professional athletes are also unionized, where there is also a great deal of variance in pay and skill between the best and the worst athletes.

Both actors and athletes face a different dynamic, due to the fact that there’s a limited number of spots on the field / the set. This keeps crab mentality at bay to some extent. The same is not true for most workplaces.

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#256

Post by flerchin »

wil421 wrote: post #78
flerchin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best airline pilot lands the plane the same as the worst.

The best airline pilots get the best routes for the best airlines and are mostly retired military. At the other end you have cargo pilots and regional flights that carry a brand of major airline but are operated by a different company. Look at salary differences. https://www.thepilotguys.com/blog/airline-pilot-salary

In general, these are due to union rules. The union decides what the compensation is, and it's largely by seniority. The airline makes no more money from retired military pilots than they do from any other pilot.

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#257

Post by flerchin »

itsoktocry wrote: post #56
flerchin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best airline pilot lands the plane the same as the worst.

> The best airline pilot lands the plane the same as the worst Have you considered there's more to being a pilot than landing the plane?

Plenty more, but the economic impact to the airline is the same from any individual pilot.

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#258

Post by flerchin »

II2II wrote: post #215
Ekaros wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now what qualifies as landing?

Collect a large number of pilots, divide them into two pools based upon their performance (low and high). Which pool do you think will incur more expenses to the airline? Keep in mind that some of those costs range from reducing consumer confidence (poor landings or damaged cargo), to planes requiring more maintenance (increased costs of maintenance, planes taken out of service more often), to planes being put out of…

There's only acceptable piloting and not. There's no pilot that makes the airline 10x more per flight.

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#259

Post by runako »

iteria wrote: post #251
runako wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my wage at a job may not rise quickly, my raise at a job jump rockets up 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.

> > my wage at a job may not rise quickly, my raise at a job jump rockets up > 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 wha…

I sort of guessed you were earlier in your career. The plateau broadly is around $250k in TC, with engineers having to move into management (e.g. change jobs) to earn much more. (Yes, there are some companies where this is not true. But most tech workers do not work at pure tech firms and so this is more aligned with their reality.)

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.)

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#260

Post by bluGill »

djha-skin wrote: post #205

Laborers need a union because their work is not differentiated. Anyone can dig a ditch. Most people can put grocery carts away. With a little training, most people can even drive a bus. Because of this, market forces drive businesses to treat them inhumanely and pay them so little money that they can't support a family on it. On the other hand, engineers are highly differentiated. I'm a DevOps engineer. I'm probably…

Ditch diggers may need a union, but if the ditch is dug with a manual shovel they won't get one because as soon as they organize the boss will fire them and hire someone else. A ditch digger who operates a backhoe needs a union and can get one because you can't hire just anyone to operate a backhoe (I can operate one, but I'll spend the first several days randomly pulling levers until what I want happens does - don't put me close to something important for the first week as I'll destroy it moving the wrong way - after a month I'd be good, but that is a month of paying me while not getting your ditches dug)

Grocery workers rarely have a union, and when they do they rarely go on strike because the workers don't really have enough skills to not be replaced. It only works at all because every clerk going on strike at once is hard to replace.

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