Kickstarter employees vote to unionize • Hacker News Board

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#221

Post by jaredtn » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

I would love to understand the dynamic better, so please correct me here or chime in.

Tech is has one of the best combinations of (lucrative + meritocratic) I've seen. Fields that pay similarly or better (law, medicine, investment banking) require either significant time-consuming credentials or significant time investment as an underlying (like IB analyst).

The interview process does require intensive preparation to land a top spot. However, your compensation package increases proportionately to the preparatory time. From the mind of a top performer, wouldn't you want to seek out the best of the best, rather than settling for median wage? It seems like unionizing will encourage the top workers to leave while the below-average to stay, dragging down the overall talent pool.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#222

Post by lawnchair_larry » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

What an awful decision by those employees. They’re in for a rude awakening.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#223

Post by coldpie » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #138

I want to know if their union contract does anything from preventing parent co from shipping jobs to places with less regulation and cheaper labor...

That will kill your company way, way faster than any union will.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#224

Post by karatestomp » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

kleer001 wrote: post #53

stronglikedan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful Assuming all of the risk is useful. I understand the point, but it's undercut by that woefully inaccurate jab.

> Assuming all of the risk is useful. I've never seen a multi-millionaire, let alone a billionaire actually take the cost of failure on personally. Risk externalization is the theme of the era.

Putting aside that if "I may get slightly less rich but still never have to do anything, whatsoever, that I don't want to, ever, and neither will the next two generations of my family" is the risk please fucking sign me up for taking that "consequence of failure", I don't even need the chance at up-side.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#225

Post by busterarm » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

I guess they didn't think they could win their vote when there were ~110 employees but they did when there were 86.

I guess things were so tense between the two camps that many people moved on.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#226

Post by technotony » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #170

umvi wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Democracy is cool, until we look at companies. Then it's dictatorships as the norm. Democracy is a horribly inefficient system of government. Its only redeeming quality is that it seems effective at (so far) deterring tyranny and abuse of power. However, like I said, it's horribly inefficient. Changes that are easy to make under a dictatorship can be extremely hard to make under a democracy. Not exactly a quality y…

Linus and Guido a) do not control anyone's paycheck b) cannot control who decides they're interested in working on Linux and Python. The benevolent dictatorship model works great when people can vote with their feet (or their keyboards, as the case may be) whether they support the dictator in the first place. The contributors to Linux and Python have more influence over the projects than the dictators do - they conti…

You don't get to decide who leaves. If people don't like a companies dictator then they are free to go join another company. It's this competition in the free market for labor that helps prevent the abuses of tyranny.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#227

Post by Jweb_Guru » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

notyourday wrote: post #59

pcwalton wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There wouldn't be any programmers in the Bay Area—or, for that matter, the US—if price were the only relevant factor in hiring developers.

That's what Detroit thought.

Sorry, so you're saying that Detroit's auto industry went away because they unionized? The thing they did many decades before that?

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#228

Post by busterarm » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

rolltiide wrote: post #27

more shares for everyone! immediate monthly vesting, no 1-year cliffs, refreshers 6 months in woooo! I hear some companies are already like this, but then you have other companies with like only 5% vesting on the first year and no refreshers.

Kickstarter has had no intention of going public and doesn't issue shares like that to employees at all.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#229

Post by wellthisisgreat » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

mempko wrote: post #166

wellthisisgreat wrote: post #117

Wow this really sad, provided Kickstarter is one of the nicest places to work at and their public benefit corporation was not empty words. These people ruined a really nice NYC company for everyone around. Anyone running their company who thought of making the workplace a bit different will expect the kind of crowd from this photo to show up and implode it. One thing is if the conditions were bad, there was insane ov…

Why do you hate people making Kickstarter what it is? The people actually doing the work want a union, how is that ruining the company?

The whole thing started as political stunt sort of due to the neo-nazis' outcry over some anti-fascist project. It was a mess (of course not sympathizing with Breitbart at all for the record).

And now they just added a whole new overhead of dealing with their initiative. Look at that one-pager of extremely poorly formulated demands. Obviously the company will have to spend resources sorting this out, through lawyers, through hiring MORE managers to deal with these managers. KS is NOT a bad place to work at by large margin it's a GOOD place to work at.

I am hearing already around here in NYC that no I don't want to go work there next to these folks, I am a developer not a polit-sci wannabe etc.

The spectacular outcome would be if KS fails to raise more funds because of this which is quite a possibility.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#230

Post by mech1234 » Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

Kickstarter prints money, so I don't think they'll be hurt too much by this.

I think that Kickstarter as a company could exist in its current form with little change for a long time. I wonder how the culture works around there.