121–130 of 276 posts
Tech workers are as disparate and varied as non-tech workers... There is a hierarchy and I think it is unlikely we will see common ground emerge. Survival of the fittest and the best will still win the day. Just like the labor unions of the industrial era, efforts like this are doomed to be spikes of ideology rife with the same contradictions of those it proposes to keep in check. Some tech workers run multimillion d…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> employees lose the right to negotiate their own compensation. I have never heard of that. Why would that be?
At my last job(not tech), our wages were negotiated with the union at a much lower rate than our competitors and owed dues. We had no control because the union was "representing" us and we could take it or quit.
By maintaining a chokehold on who can supply a vital resource (labor) to businesses, Unions have a history of strangling their patrons - See Detroit. From a distributed systems perspective, Unions represent a single point of failure.
I'm entirely in favor of groups banding together to request, nee, demand, rights, pay increases, healthcare. Once they start having 'management' tiers of their own, they're no longer representing you - They're a corporation you work for, contracting to your nominal employer. Just being clearer about it doesn't work - Microsoft hires an army of 'contractors' who are abused in precisely the same way. Nor does having multiple competing pseudo-unions - There's dozens of headhunters to go through to work for microsoft, but they all compete on 'price' and drive wages down[2].
[1]http://www.nrtw.org/required-join-pay-teacher/ - "educators cannot be required to do more than pay a union fee (typically called an "agency fee") that equals their share of what the union can prove is its costs of collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance adjustment" - Which is to say, you don't have to join the union, they just get to negotiate for you, take a cut of your pay, and be the intermediary that represents you - While you've proved your disloyalty to them by not choosing to 'join' them, so they have no actual incentive to do so. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrichs_v._California_Teach...
[2] The lightly fictionalized https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs, which still rings very true more than 20 years later.
The same forces that have killed unions in the US will kill this. As long as labor can be shipped to areas of the world with a lower quality of life, they will do so. Lower level tech positions like tech support have already been shipped overseas, and once countries like India and China develop the infrastructure to take higher level tech jobs, they will go there too. If we want to protect our workers, our labor laws…
1. "Overseas" is a curious definition. Linux was written in Finland, after all. Would blocking US workers from aiding Finnish technology have been productive? 2. Can it be stopped? If US companies refuse to work with Indian or Chinese employees, what is preventing India or China from out-competing the US company in the international market? If the US places tariffs on technology products and services from other count…
2. It can be stopped. The US was an economic powerhouse before globalization, and had an incredibly powerful middle class with a high quality of life. What China has done is use the money from outsourcing into creating its own internal industries, which is why their economy is rising all across the board, while in the US we've been outsourcing our industries to the point where only the capital owners who exploit globalization are seeing an increase in quality of life. If we stop that, the globalists will suffer but our middle class will rise. As far as competition goes, what does it matter if we have the "strongest market" or whatever if the majority of people don't benefit from it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If it's going to do anything but be window dressing then it needs to have the teeth of union - so just call it what it is. This sounds like it's going to have exactly zero to do with what a labor union would normally be concerned with -- pay, working conditions, etc. Instead, I have a strong suspicion this is going to be some sort of enumeration of the progressive ideals that all tech workers "should" be concerned…
I don't see what that would really accomplish, though. All companies already publicly advertise the 'moral' beliefs you mentioned, yet continue hiring white male whiteboard challenge mavericks.
Is that even true? Are you counting Asians and light-complexioned immigrants the same as American white people in this context?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will happen. The limiting factor is we need to get the friction for forking an existing co-op down close to zero. Unfortunately most people who work for a co-op still think of it as proprietary ("this is my co-op, and we don't have any openings right now. If you want yours you have to start your own"). Intellectual resistance from co-opers isn't the main bottleneck though. Management infrastructure needs to be all…
>> It will happen. As someone who was born and raised in the Soviet Union and spent the last 20 years in the US, I hope to dear god this doesn't ever happen. I don't know where else I'd have to emigrate if it does. To Mars maybe? What you're describing is essentially "collective enterprise" or "kolkhoz", where nominally you own a share in a venture, but in practice you don't own shit, and as a result you don't consid…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting because it would need to have the teeth of a union yes, but unlike unions of the past that lobbied for better wages and working conditions, what is being proposed is a union to ensure their company does what the workers feel is morally right for the world (not necessarily their customers, but the greater community of people affected by each companies goals and purposes).
I understand that's the thrust of the post, but practically those things aren't really that much different if done effectively. You make a good point though and if the intention is that it will result in some kind of engineering code of conduct or Hippocratic oath - then my guess is that it will have too many hurdles. The military code of conduct is immensely difficult to arbitrate and the Hippocratic oath isn't anyt…
You don't get the power of a union without the self-interest that makes a union.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> It will happen. As someone who was born and raised in the Soviet Union and spent the last 20 years in the US, I hope to dear god this doesn't ever happen. I don't know where else I'd have to emigrate if it does. To Mars maybe? What you're describing is essentially "collective enterprise" or "kolkhoz", where nominally you own a share in a venture, but in practice you don't own shit, and as a result you don't consid…
You were flagged, but I don't see any rule violations so I vouched for you. I share many of your same fears. But your argument is a slippery slope argument, so I can't really argue against it. Maybe you're right, and the worker-owned Pizza co-op down the street from me will slide into Stalinist authoritarianism. We'll see. I think the fact that it is voluntary and you are at will to choose an ownership-based enterpri…
"Exploitation of workers" is actually the greatest thing about the West. Those workers wouldn't even be able to care for themselves if they weren't "exploited", and by creating the societal pressure to do so, through moderate poverty (very few people in the US know what real, actual poverty is), and general disapproval of leisurely lifestyle, you motivate people to be productive, which ultimately benfits society. Then, once they acquire a modicum of wealth and property, they get to "exploit" others by paying them a mutually agreed upon fee in order to have some work done.
I'm technically a "worker" who is quite happy to be "exploited" by my capitalist overlords, as long as I get paid a few hundred thousand dollars a year. Sure, they make millions, and I make much less but so what?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're not special. We're just like the other engineering disciplines.
Our starting salaries are much larger than other engineering disciplines, and I'd argue we don't make nearly as stable constructions as other engineers. In Australia the starting-out civil engineering salary is almost half the starting-out software engineering salary (and this is a country which hates technical innovation and prefers building more mines).
As programmers, conversely, we build text files that are expected to change every day as the business needs shift, and we know up front that most of the code that we write will not survive as-is. Speed of iteration is far more important than getting things right the first time, and the cost of a delay in the name of building something right can be much higher than the cost of refactoring the simplest solution that can possibly work once you actually need to (YAGNI is not something you'll hear very often in physical engineering fields).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like the fictional future on Mars in the Kim Stanley Robinson novels where there are no companies, but co-ops. Your time goes into the co-op and everyone owns a portion of that for life. This is a greater dramatic shift and I'm not sure if we'll see it in our lifetimes, but it would be nice that, even that first high school job at a cinema would earn you shares in that company equal to the time you put in, for life…
There's nothing that precludes people from creating employee owned companies now. Where I live there are several of them, and there's the possibility that the one I work at is going to transition to that. If they don't exist in large numbers now, I'd have to think there's something about them that makes them struggle to be viable. Human nature most likely.
It's hard to measure the effects, but it's generally thought to have at least lead to less-bitter labor conflicts, because there's constant communication between the parties.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The worst aspect isn't just the right to negotiate your own compensation but doing better work has no reward. Get any decent size shop and your going to have that one person if not two that everyone just carries. then there is that asshole who becomes shop steward and well, you best hope you agree with them. Yeah i am a bit jaded but no thanks. Let alone like it will matter because outsourcing will just become the st…
> Get any decent size shop and your going to have that one person if not two that everyone just carries. > then there is that asshole who becomes shop steward and well, you best hope you agree with them. But that happens in tech already! And usually that one person is friends with the boss, or a long-term employee who did good work once and is now coasting, or is really good at this one skill that the company doesn't…
But carry on with your starry-eyed idealism.