141–150 of 695 posts
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.
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…
Seems like a good time to unionize is when you don't need it, while the job is good. Get the union in place and work through issues like on-call, laying out actual articulable and measurable performance targets for review time, work-life balance rules and other "small" things while the job is good. That way when the money grubbing starts, the true horror-show policies are attempted, etc - you have an established unio…
it'd be great if a worker-friendly culture was instilled in the company from its earliest days, but i'm not sure if a) there's an effective minimum size needed to unionize or b) if the existence of a union would kill your ability to fundraise in the future
But I think that change is coming. Enough engineers have gotten burned (or been through the startup washing machine enough times) to suspect that the profession as a whole needs to be able to self-advocate.
Burnout? Yes. Overwork? Maybe. Unionize? Eh… The post reeks of privilege. Go work a manual labor job outside in the sun for a few weeks and tell me how bad tech employees have it. Most of non-tech America is not empathetic to our plights. They’ll probably cheer on the offshoring of our jobs.
I am not really decided if i am pro or anti tech unions yet but this argument always comes up and falls flat for me. It just smells like pitting the working classes against each other. Are we more privileged than most? Sure. We are still closer to broke then we are to the 1%.
Peter Turchin's research indicates this is not a good description of where the lines are. The elites are roughly the top ten percent and represent an important barrier. Billionaires are involved, but elites as a whole are more numerous and closer to the steep, stark social cliff face that defines the abyss.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great. Show me examples of teams who took that bet and how it paid off.
Let’s take the NYT Tech Guild. They negotiated a new contract following a strike last November. Here are some of the things they won: > Enhanced job security with ‘just cause’ protections > Guaranteed wage increases for the first time of up to 8.25% (plus additional base rate discretionary compensation) that prioritize the largest wage increases for the lowest paid members over the life of the contract > Additional c…
Unions will kickstart the offshoring of our career. Just like every other place unions exist without a talent monopoly (manufacturing, automotive, and most recently film crews).
Google is going to hire in developing markets and stop hiring domestically. Everyone else will follow. The talent in India is incredible these days. You can't knock them or call them less talented than US engineers. They're rock solid. And there are lots of other talented worldwide markets for software engineering.
Without antitrust action from the DOJ/FTC, big tech will continue to crush domestic startups too or create a ceiling for how large they can grow in our market.
And if unions lead to offshoring happening, we're fucked.
Check out their wins: https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/our-wins
Lots of references to contractors wins which I think are more important but the facts make the opposite point then the article is making.
The reason why software engineers won’t unionize in the US is because the US has weakened the power of unions so much.
There are already unions in Europe for Alphabet that have done things - the French union just outright rejected alphabets attempt to do layoffs.
We joined the burnout machine under our own free will. What else did we expect? Moloch's not getting any less hungry.
It was not the burnout machine when all of us joined.
We were just younger. Now we have lives and families and sleeping under our desks sounds far less appealing when there's a warm bed with a spouse you love back home...
The author seems to think that everybody works this way. In reality, many of us work 40-45 hour weeks with no on call and low amounts of meetings. These jobs are in the boring (military, banking, insurance etc) sectors but I make a good, not great, living.
I work at a FANG. Senior SDE. I don't have slack on my phone. I don't read emails (unless someone tells me out of band that one needs a response). Once I close this laptop work is dead to me until the following day. You pick and choose your own involvement. I'm "passionate" about the job. I consider it a craft and a lifelong pursuit. I'm writing a book on the topic. But the job is just a job. I'm here because they gi…
Have there been successful general-software unions formed before? I see and hear this idea relatively frequently, but never past that. I sort of feel like most people don't stay at a place long enough to get cohesion or see enough they don't want to stay in the first place, good people chase better job offers (and congratulate themselves for doing it on their own), less good may stick around longer because they can't…
I work in a union shop and I admit that it doesn't seem to have all the problems I have with the big tech. People seem to care and have passion, but don't pretend to work 80 hours a week, some of them at least. Some of them are decades older then me. Nobody is ever fired, but it somehow pays well above the median pay, but not comparable to the big tech.
So why would good people want to join this union when they could have a better life elsewhere?