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The Burnout Machine

unionize.fyi

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Re: The Burnout Machine

#101

Post by toomuchtodo »

wyager wrote: post #60
test098 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_St... pretty much every team in blue collar industries which have been able to negotiate better working conditions, better pay, and more time off.

But tech isn't a blue collar industry, and this is about tech unions.

Why is tech not blue collar? Because you use your brain instead of your hands? You are closer to a plumber or an electrician than to Sergey Brin, griping that you should be working 60 hours a week to develop AI to replace you for Alphabet shareholders.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#102

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Cyph0n wrote: post #77
FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you working 7 days a week in horrific circumstances? Do you have children as your colleagues? No? That’s due to unions and labourers fighting for the rights you currently have.

Unbelievable that this had to be spelled out. Do people actually think that current working conditions and employee rights were bestowed upon us by benevolent capitalists?

When it comes to tech workers, not by benevolent capitalists, but by greedy capitalists.

Up until say 2022 or so, the vast majority of people who worked in tech companies in the US were compensated extremely well (relatively) without unions, the reason being that (a) modern tech, especially software, can be such a "force multiplier" where a small team of programmers can serve millions of customers and (b) there really is a huge difference in individual programmer capability, and in winner-take-all/most markets, capitalists were willing to pay outsized amounts for those they deemed higher quality workers (meaning able to create higher quality/better/faster etc. products).

We're at an inflection point now both with the general maturity of the Internet, and with AI, that the ability to capture huge parts of the market is less dependent on the skills of individual software engineers/product managers, etc. When you are less able to differentiate the quality of your labor against your peers, that is when unions become more desirable.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#103

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #18

Class consciousness is firmly in the zeitgeist: witness season 1 of Severance. There is no going back from this, as once you are disillusioned it is much harder to be re-illusioned. There will be some sort of collective response by white-collar professionals at some point. I think people are ready for change.

Most developers are paid more than 2x the median wage. For HN, that difference is probably 3x-5x or more. If class consciousness is on the rise, HN's readership is in the classes that the lower economic strata are going to be rising up against. If you have any illusions that the proletariat will welcome you with open arms for your claimed solidarity, think again or you might be in for a shock; specifically, a short, sharp shock.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#104

Post by legitster »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #58
film42 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. Show me examples of teams who took that bet and how it paid off.

Are you working 7 days a week in horrific circumstances? Do you have children as your colleagues? No? That’s due to unions and labourers fighting for the rights you currently have.

Unionization, mandatory schooling, and work-life balance are all collective outcomes of industrialization and urbanization. Claiming that one caused the other is silly oversimplification.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#105

Post by ryandrake »

philjohn wrote: post #52
dadrian wrote: post #36

What Big Tech companies are demanding 80 hours a week?

Not demanding per se, but when you're stack ranked against people who ARE ...

Exactly. As usual, HN commenters are rat-holing on the precise meaning of "demanding 80 hour weeks" and trying to refute it by saying "Well, ackshually, companies don't spell out an explicit requirement for exactly 80 hours, therefore there exists no pressure to work long hours!"

Example given: When one of your co-workers gets visible praise and maybe a small spot bonus for burning the midnight oil, working a heroic 100 hour week, and saving a production outage, this sends a clear message to everyone else: more working hours will be rewarded and normal working hours is just doing the bare minimum. This message is unwritten but clearly sent/received.

When you are stack ranked against your peers in the company, most are working 80 hour weeks and some are working 40 hour weeks, and the 40 hour guys get PIP'ed, this sends a clear, yet unwritten message, too.

There doesn't have to exist a written policy that says "You must work 80 hour weeks" for it to be an unofficial, coerced part of the culture.

It's as if nobody here saw the "15 pieces of flair" scene in Office Space.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#106

Post by Nullabillity »

heraldgeezer wrote: post #87
film42 wrote: post #11

I think unions need to work on their marketing. I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems." What's the A+ example out there of a unionized engineering team that has been able to find a great work-life balance, great benefits, and a fun product development life-cycle that is profitable or clearly on its way to profitability? Show me th…

In Sweden, devs and IT can just join the office worker union... https://www.unionen.se/in-english/this-is-unionen It helps because at the end of the day you are just an excel sheet with numbers to your employer.

Or Sveriges Ingenjörer.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#107

Post by woah »

For some reason this sounds AI-written, especially this paragraph:

> Companies love to brag about their innovation, but the real innovation is finding new ways to make us disposable. Permanent employment? That’s for suckers. Why pay benefits and offer job security when they can churn through contractors and freelancers like cheap code? And don’t get me started on those non-compete clauses - designed to keep you locked down and terrified to make a move that might actually be good for your career.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#108

Post by shagie »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #51

I don't want a union... I want state licenses like doctors, nurse, lawyers, engineers, etc.

Like with "practicing medicine without a license" or "practicing law without a license" ... what would constitute "practicing software development without a license?"

The licenses are enforced by law... and just having a certificate isn't sufficient for them to be useful. You also have to say "you can't do this without a license."

Re: The Burnout Machine

#109

Post by finnthehuman »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #51

I don't want a union... I want state licenses like doctors, nurse, lawyers, engineers, etc.

Have you considered instituting a formal quality system? I'm not even saying that it's an alternative to or incompatible with licensing, but there are off-the-shelf standards for software process and quality you can download and implement today without government action.

A surgeon doesn't get to time-travel and test 1000 different ways to make a cut. You don't get to build 1000 bridges in the same location for load testing. But with software we can have a final deliverable that remains inert if you put quality gates between the development process and deployment. There is a very strong argument that when it is possible to have process and testing to hold the deliverable itself to the standards, that puts more confidence in the deliverable than just practitioner sign-off that it's right.

Re: The Burnout Machine

#110

Post by ketzo »

> It’s a meat grinder that chews up developers, sysadmins, and infosec pros

…and designers, and PMs, and sales and marketing and support and…

I know that, charitably, the point is that engineers often have higher leverage than other individual contributors at a tech company.

But the whole point of a union is to join together employees (as opposed to employers) for greater leverage. Don’t make your tent smaller for no reason!

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