191–200 of 263 posts
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Most everyone is a temporarily embarrassed unicorn founder around here.
Just one line of code away from being an alpha tech bro with Elon's number on their phone.
What traits do you think are going to be common in the audience it attracts?
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You're thinking of a different kind of company than the paper is talking about. (The headline, presumably written by the university's PR team, is a bit misleading about this.) The paper is about a certain kind of firm (e.g., the Big Four accounting firms, management consultancies like McKinsey, some elite law firms) that explicitly uses an "up or out" model, and explains why this kind of firm's business model (in par…
I don't think anyone here is actually reading the paper. The conversation is all about Tech workers and unions. At least thats the way I'm reading these comments as of now.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
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>>the manager is not politely savvy enough to ensure their team is being recognized for work that grows or is valuable to the business. Actually in most companies, no ones watching whats happening, no ones watching who performs, who slacks, or anything for that matter. Companies are basically a kind of a loosely assembled random crowd, where no one cares a thing about anything. In this kind of a set up both hardwork…
Sorry you've only worked in places like that. There are places where very smart people doing work that nobody in the company can do and they are well aware and rewarded for it.
What about the vast majority of workers that are doing the grudge work that keeps the company afloat? Do they not deserve a say in the direction of the company? Do workers not deserve democracy in the work place to decide their own fates? Why should this be left of to centralized communist dictatorships (boards + executives)?
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And when has a union ever stopped a multinational company from just closing shop and opening up overseas? If a company making physical things can do it, how hard do you think it would be for a software company?
It's not as if companies aren't shipping non-union jobs overseas or importing labor from overseas anyway. There's also a certain amount of irrational sentiment around silicon valley and the west coast generally. There's little doubt that companies could move shop to places in the US that aren't so insanely overpriced and without the high cost of living, especially with work from home being so popular, but for whateve…
Choose any other major metro city in the US outside of the west coast and you will see the same.
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Yet isn't it a regular complaint that European tech salaries are half of what they would be in the US?
Isn't it a regular complaint that American tech workers don't get the kinds of benefits they would in Europe, especially healthcare? Even someone with a very nice American salary can be bankrupted by medical expenses very easily in America. When Americans do end up bankrupt it's usually medical debt that is to blame. It seems like there should be room for a happy medium somewhere where some workers in the US maybe do…
But the answer is that your insurance shouldn’t be tied to your employer in the US. You don’t need unions for that.
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I don't care what kind or style of job - if the balance of power in any labour relationship is overwhelmingly on the employer side, collective action is the only way labour can regain a modicum of negotiating power. To think that the style of job has any bearing on this relationship is naive.
I do agree collective action specifically can help, but not via organizing with a modern American Union.
The United Auto Workers partially funded the Port Huron Statement authored by Students for a Democratic Society, a generally socialist group. Now, it's entirely plausible that the UAW leadership wanted to have some modicum of influence, and that's why they loaned them an entire union retreat on Lake Huron. But I doubt that the average UAW factory worker was excited to see their union dues used to provide elite college students with a mostly-free vacation for political organizing.
I am not a labor law expert by any means, but my understanding of, say, German labor law is that it's much better at actually representing the workers in a given factory, in part because a union that doesn't do that loses its members to ones that will (since there's no requirement that everyone in a given job class has to join the same union).
> The firm starts to underpay those better workers who kept their jobs, akin to making them pay for being “chosen.” Consequently, profits do not decline and may even increase. > “Firms now essentially can threaten the remaining employees: ‘Look, I can let you go, and everybody’s going to think that you’re the worst in the pool. If you want me not to let you go, you need to accept below market wages,’” This is exactly…
For whatever reason collective bargaining is wildly unpopular on HN, which is ironic because tech workers are exactly who should be organizing their labor.
Additionally, software developers tend to be pretty anti-gatekeeper, so if we are opposed to even credentialing, such as other engineering disciplines, why would there be any appetite for a union?
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More like Dave has been pushing up sacks of really valuable things up a hill, for years. Jack who just arrived and pushed ONE sack up slightly faster than Dave, in the first week, thinks he must be promoted above Dave right then and there. Or its oppression. To start with accept this thing first. Its human fallacy to confuse making rapid changes to a process as making fast progress. In reality sticking to one thing f…
Very good retort. I will insist both things happen and our views on it probably come down to life experience and current position. I've too often seen Dave praised for carrying sacks day in day out instead of placing them on the goddamn conveyor belt. Some have come to doubt the conveyor belts utility when we could all just be carrying the sacks. In fact if we got rid of the conveyor belt we could hire our cousin and…
And keeping the conveyor belt running seamlessly for years, requires showing up for years too.
There are no replacements for sticking to one thing for long.
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Tech attracts the radical independent types.
> Tech attracts the radical independent types. No. I think it's a combination of: 1) HN being associated with a startup incubator, and thus attracting a large contingent of people who see themselves as the boss doing this, not the workers affected; 2) tech attracts a certain kind of gullible person who's easily seduced by tidy little systems like the pop-capitalism of libertarian tracts; and 3) tech workers (until re…
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So that would be the plan, to replicate entertainment industry union pay to the tech industry? Has anyone seriously thought this through or is it just theory.
I mean you're just here repeating the lazy old anti-union talking points with 0 thought. I offered some examples that contradict them. The burden of proof is on you at this point. If not having unions leads to high wages and good working conditions, why aren't retail and fast food workers making bank? Why do they get treated like shit? Please tell us.
"Unions mean every worker gets paid the same!"
"Unions mean I will make less money!"
"Unions make it impossible to fire underperformers!"
"Unions are run by bosses whose incentives are different than workers!"
"Unions mean I can't plug in my own workstation!"
"Unions reward seniority over everything else!"
Like they've taken every spook story they've been told about unions, gathered up the worst parts, and then simply declare that unions, by law, must necessarily be all those bad things.