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Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

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Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#11

Post by lawlessone »

websiteapi wrote: post #10
mrsilencedogood wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running." Can you tell me where you work, and are you hiring???

Didn’t twitter get 3/4 people laid off? Seems to still work as of time of writing (x.com).

More bots than ever, bots can be interesting , but outside the political intrigue behind their commissioning these bots are not very interesting.

And, for now at least, advertisers on twitter can't sell products to these bots. So lost money.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#12

Post by Xss3 »

nitwit005 wrote: post #6
thinkingemote wrote: post #2

I like the idea and encourage software workers unions. Is there an umbrella union that they can belong to? How effective are these new unions? I imagine these new tech unions don't have the same "shop floor" power as in industry. Why is this? Perhaps generally the ideals the new unions are advocating for are different than traditional ones?

With a factory, the owner has to deal with the cost of all the late or canceled deliveries. With farms, the crops wither on the vines. There's not really an equivalent with most service industries. Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running.

Losing devs that built a service, its infrastructure, build pipelines, tests, etc. Can sometimes mean losing deep knowledge.

Sometimes an issue arises and without that deep knowledge you'll be waiting weeks for a fix. Better hope it isnt a critical issue like a serious vulnerability or that you can hire the deep knowledge on a temporary consultancy contract.

Sometimes services are fully rewritten from scratch because the new devs cant get a build of the old service to compile/run/do the thing™.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#13

Post by venturecruelty »

nitwit005 wrote: post #6
thinkingemote wrote: post #2

I like the idea and encourage software workers unions. Is there an umbrella union that they can belong to? How effective are these new unions? I imagine these new tech unions don't have the same "shop floor" power as in industry. Why is this? Perhaps generally the ideals the new unions are advocating for are different than traditional ones?

With a factory, the owner has to deal with the cost of all the late or canceled deliveries. With farms, the crops wither on the vines. There's not really an equivalent with most service industries. Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running.

Every on-call rotation I've ever been on would like a word.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#14

Post by CodingJeebus »

nitwit005 wrote: post #6
thinkingemote wrote: post #2

I like the idea and encourage software workers unions. Is there an umbrella union that they can belong to? How effective are these new unions? I imagine these new tech unions don't have the same "shop floor" power as in industry. Why is this? Perhaps generally the ideals the new unions are advocating for are different than traditional ones?

With a factory, the owner has to deal with the cost of all the late or canceled deliveries. With farms, the crops wither on the vines. There's not really an equivalent with most service industries. Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running.

It only takes one bad deployment to bring huge swaths of the internet down nowadays, just look at Cloudflare, AWS, etc. costing millions of dollars in downstream economic impact.

Sure, a platform will continue to run on a given day without intervention, but that’s like playing Russian roulette: at some point you’ll need intervention and you’ll likely need it fast.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#15

Post by strifey »

nitwit005 wrote: post #6
thinkingemote wrote: post #2

I like the idea and encourage software workers unions. Is there an umbrella union that they can belong to? How effective are these new unions? I imagine these new tech unions don't have the same "shop floor" power as in industry. Why is this? Perhaps generally the ideals the new unions are advocating for are different than traditional ones?

With a factory, the owner has to deal with the cost of all the late or canceled deliveries. With farms, the crops wither on the vines. There's not really an equivalent with most service industries. Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running.

Staring down the barrel of being primary on-call over Christmas for a dozen k8s clusters running thousands of nodes. How I wish it were true that we could trust computer programs to just keep running.

PagerDuty wouldn't exist if this were true.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#17

Post by palmotea »

mrsilencedogood wrote: post #9
palmotea wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want that, you’d have to negotiate for it, and now doesn’t seem like a great time. Software engineers can be pretty foolish. When we had more power, unions were unpopular because too many imbibed some libertarian propaganda, looked at their high salaries, and decided to cosplay as bosses. Now that power is slipping away, and will slip away faster because we did little to preserve it to our determent . Also t…

But how do you actually bootstrap that process? Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired. I still suspect part of the reason Epic sold them is to ninja-bust the union (or at least get it out of the way).

> But how do you actually bootstrap that process?

I don't know.

> Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.

That seems like something that should be illegal, if it's not already. It seems like a paper maneuver.

It should probably be expected that employers will play dirty, which is one of the reasons why I think the unions need to be hyper-focused on worker and workplace issues to the exclusion of all else.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#18

Post by JohnMakin »

natebc wrote: post #8
mrsilencedogood wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running." Can you tell me where you work, and are you hiring???

Their ops teams are probably ground into dust.

For real - this made me laugh, because I had the immediate exact thought. Oh boy

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#19

Post by paxys »

thinkingemote wrote: post #2

I like the idea and encourage software workers unions. Is there an umbrella union that they can belong to? How effective are these new unions? I imagine these new tech unions don't have the same "shop floor" power as in industry. Why is this? Perhaps generally the ideals the new unions are advocating for are different than traditional ones?

While things can be bad in software in general, game developers need a union more than anyone. Conditions in that industry are horrendous. The entire period of a game's development is "crunch time". Everyone is exempt, so no overtime of course. And it is standard practice to downsize studios and have mass layoffs right after big launches. It's a shame that so many are drawn to this just because of a passion for gaming.
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