121–130 of 266 posts
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As there are good and bad companies, there are good and bad unions.
Oh I agree. My opinion is massively different for smaller unions, but all humongous national unions have all become the power/greed and awfulness they were created to fight. Corruption at the core.
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And yet here we are today in Silicon Valley with lavish perks, much higher than average pay in the country for software development, and no unions. We also have the ability to fire untalented or unpleasant people, and promote especially talented individuals regardless of age or tenure. You don't need to work at any company that looks like the above. And I don't know of any company that looks like the above.
I'm sure there was an assembly line in '70s Detroit with this same conversation.
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If it was a seller's market we also wouldn't have threads about month long interviewing processes.
I’ve been asked by more than one recruiter to take a pre-test online before the company even interviewed me.
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Here's one possible way: by exploiting their negotiating position to act as a check against management's impulses to sell cathedrals of journalism for spare parts on the promise that maybe the resulting third-tier incarnation of Buzzfeed that will result might temporarily juice returns to owners. Maybe it's possible that the people actually doing the work know better about how to run a successful media company than t…
> Maybe it's possible that the people actually doing the work know better about how to run a successful media company than the Troncs do? Why don't they start their own media company then rather than resort to short-term value extraction tactics which will likely drive said "cathedral of journalism" into the ground?
I thought this was interesting because if knowledge workers like journalists can do so, why not programmers, or what ever term you'd prefer to be called?
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-software-engineers-make-so-much...
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Why do we need a union in a seller's market? If I'm unhappy with my job I can quit and get a new one in a week. It's not about being a knowledge worker. Screenwriters are unionized because there are many more people who want to write than there are gigs, therefore there's a high potential for abuse.
Why do we need a union in a seller's market? I think this is going to change soon (~10 years). I have seen people with computer science masters degrees working in support positions. I’m not talking about maintenance development, I’m talking about tech support. When I graduated there were maybe 5 people in my class, but now the market is starting to get flooded with CS people. Everyone is hopping on the CS train like…
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The unions aren't for the A-list, they're for the struggling actors who would get paid minimum wage otherwise (or worse, you'd see a lot of "unpaid internships").
Ask the non-union folk about that. Getting into a movie industry union is very difficult and rather expensive to boot. You don't just get into these unions by showing up at the door. The correlation to software would be having a list of progressively difficult things you have to do, so that, ultimately, only 10% of people make it in. The rest pay their dues by working minimum wage jobs and unpaid internships.
I thought this was interesting because if knowledge workers like journalists can do so, why not programmers, or what ever term you'd prefer to be called?
I will quit from any employer that forces all programmers to negotiate as a unit, because I believe that compensation should be based purely on your individual skills and the market. I also believe that forced collective bargaining is unconstitutional, because it requires people to associate with a group that they don't want to associate with. If a group of people wish to collectively bargain with their employer, tha…
It's not based on that now.
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> If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers work in noisy bullpen environments where they have to blast music into their ears with headphones to focus their attention on what they're building? I'm curious, how does your office look like?
https://i.imgur.com/lziE8QA.jpg It's open, but we got it because we loved the building, and we have two conference rooms with doors for calls. (My "desk" is a big couch with a monitor arm mounted to the wall.)
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Why do we need a union in a seller's market? If I'm unhappy with my job I can quit and get a new one in a week. It's not about being a knowledge worker. Screenwriters are unionized because there are many more people who want to write than there are gigs, therefore there's a high potential for abuse.
If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers work under onerous IP contracts that grant their employers rights to what they build in their spare time? If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers work in noisy bullpen environments where they have to blast music into their ears with headphones to focus their attention on what they're building? If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers…
Working in product or in project management is literally 10% of the stress with the same pay. How does that make any sense?