111–120 of 256 posts
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You must have worked at places with exceedingly good management, or not at startups.
If a company has experienced both boom times and recessive economic times, I think its "startup" status is arguable, depending on a few other factors.
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Not sure where "tying pay to tenure" came up, unless that's how you view what unions do? A union just means a group of employees negotiating as a unit, what changes they ask for isn't dictated in advance.
>Not sure where "tying pay to tenure" came up, This is how basically every union workplace in the US works. The pay-scale becomes very rigid. Why would tech be different?
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The gaming industry has an interesting problem: a lot of fresh college grads that want to work on games because they are passionate about games. In that case, I'm unsure of how unionizing would help much, as publishers could simply invest in games from non-union shops, and happily abandon the studios that are unionized.
> In that case, I'm unsure of how unionizing would help much, as publishers could simply invest in games from non-union shops, and happily abandon the studios that are unionized. and game development work is probably the most trivial software development to move to foreign jurisdictions. unless the union promoters would like video game tariffs.
Maybe unionization needs a disrupt? I'm not against unionization in a lot of industries, but it just doesn't make sense in its current form for the tech scene or any other high demand position. It feels like an outdated mechanism used for people who were happy to sit in the same role, doing the same thing, for 45yrs.
Modern unions that only represent one type of skill or workers in one company (or both!) are far less effective than historical unions that aimed to unionize as many workers as possible under the same umbrella. Being able to represent your members even if they switch companies gives you a lot more opportunities. Unions are (at least supposed to be) democratically run, so if tech workers don't want to sit in the same…
Nobody cares much about that any more.
If you want to see a modern union, check out The Animation Guild.[1] Local 839, IATSE. They represent most of the major studio animators in Hollywood. Although they've tried, they have not been able to organize game developers.
It's about fear. Try to organize a union in the US and you will probably be fired. Even though that's illegal. WalMart has closed down stores that voted in a union. Uber workers have a strike scheduled for July 15, but it probably won't do much in the US.
My Dad owns a construction company in a highly unionized region. He is an advocate for unions, although he acknowledges that quality varies among them. That said, many of the conditions where unions are beneficial don't seem to apply in tech: * Vocational training: unions in our area run schools to train craftsman (e.g. carpenters). This increases productivity and screens for quality. * Shifting workforce: Constructi…
Vocational training absolutely could be done in tech, web/app development is much closer to carpentry than it is to computer science in my view. Unions are definitely complex, it's not a silver bullet to solve issues in the workplace. But at its core it's a group of people negotiating as a unit: the rest is just the natural evolution of a group where some power has been attained. More members means more organization…
With remote work, computer science is much more global, so someone could easily be trained by a union and then go work for a company that doesn't support the union.
Interestingly, this is one of my Dad's main complaints about unions these days: That our city trains great carpenters, but then they are recruited away to non-union areas.
Maybe unionization needs a disrupt? I'm not against unionization in a lot of industries, but it just doesn't make sense in its current form for the tech scene or any other high demand position. It feels like an outdated mechanism used for people who were happy to sit in the same role, doing the same thing, for 45yrs.
It's hard for me to envision unions in a white collar environment when there's a pretty high likelihood of individual contributors being promoted to management. In factories, there's usually a separate management class of people who are engineers or college grads who are brought in to lead, so the whole worker vs management dichotomy is much clearer.
1. Everybody's complaining about how they don't want to be promoted to management after a certain age and remain an IC.
2. Very few people, proportionally, are actually promoted to management.
3. Management vs worker is alive and well in all domains, this can be seen as the years pass in the attitudes of those promoted to management. It's the nature of the job, not the education.
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>Not sure where "tying pay to tenure" came up, This is how basically every union workplace in the US works. The pay-scale becomes very rigid. Why would tech be different?
Surely a next-gen labor union based in the tech industry could find a new way to fight ageism without mandating a seniority system. Why does tech have to act the same way as before? I thought we were supposed to be innovators?
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These are not high demand professions. They are a very limited number of jobs available with many more people who would love to fill them.
Yes, and professional athletes don't get promoted to management at all. Some do become managers or other executives but that requires them to retire as a player and then negotiate an entirely separate contract for the management job.
Neither do most employees either, what does that have to do with anything? We can't organize because there's a 5% chance that we're promoted to management?
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There's a dichotomy in software development between the developers who represent single points of failure in an organization and the increasing number of "replaceable" developers i.e. developers versed only in popular frameworks or who hold introductory/recent-grad levels of domain knowledge with no desire to go further. I think right now were in a "golden age" where the latter group still holds power and can command…
This exists in all industries. It is called experience. Developers convincing themselves that they're single points of failure is arrogance, IMO. 99.9% of the time if you leave then someone can step right up and take your place. Oh sure there will be costs, lost productivity, maybe an outage, but the world keeps turning. So go ahead and take that vacation.
On the other hand its like a mediocre army doing a great job because of a great general. That general leaves/dies and the army falls apart or is reduced to a fraction of its former self.
Especially at smaller orgs with constrained resources, they may replace their technical lead but if the replacement flounders, and the replacement's replacement flounders, the whole org becomes FUBAR. In this sense that original technical lead becomes ipso-facto irreplaceable (IMO).
The benefit in tech is options. Don't like your job, get another one. Don't like your boss, get another one. For many locations it's just the matter of turning a button on Linkedin or for many people sending some emails. That keeps people idealistic, vocal and demanding of the behavior from their employer/bosses. This is not the norm in other business functions. Unfortunately.
that's all fine and good but it won't last. once the labor supply catches up with the demand (and it will -> just look at the vast number of new engineers created in the last 5 years from 2019 Dev survey), it will be all over and all that bargaining power will go away. We're already starting to see the beginning of that with the awful hiring practices we've been seeing.
At the same time, companies endlessly bemoan that they can't find enough people, so there's a big push for immigration to fill the gaps, bootcamps, etc.
Maybe those people that are anti-union because they consider themselves too skilled really are skilled, however the two issues I described above will definitely hit anyone from mid level downwards.