As uniform as possible is exactly the wrong way to go. It only takes one data point overlooked or newly discovered to make every person trying to look identical distinct. New fingerprinting techniques are being implemented all the time, so what's the point in taking chances when it's far easier to randomly change a browsers fingerprint for each site/connection making it much harder to track any one browser over time.
It seems more likely that someone else comes in and either colludes with the people who are screwing us to get a piece of the action or gets bought out by one of the big companies who started all this. Since the rare times companies get caught they only get weak slaps on the wrist where they only pay a fraction of what they made in profits (basically just the US demanding their cut) I don't have much faith things will improve any time soon.
Even China has no reason to reduce prices much for memory sold to the US when they know we have no choice but to buy at the prices already set by the cartel.
I expect that if China does start making memory they'll sell it cheap within China and export it at much higher prices. Maybe we'll get a black market for cheap DRAM smuggled out of China though.
They should have not collected any more data than they needed, deleted the data they had the instant it wasn't absolutely required, and securely stored all data they truly had to retain. It really isn't that hard to do those things, it's just harder (and more expensive) than not giving a shit, but universities (and just about everyone else hoovering up your private data) just don't give a shit about you and they know they'll get away with it when their negligence/incompetence results in a breach.
The fact that in this instance the breach may have also impacted some of the same people who decided to be so massively irresponsible doesn't change anything.
> It is my opinion that, as with anything that can be copied infinitely for free, his (and my) personal information is worth $0.
This would include all software, every movie, song, book, photograph, and TV show available anywhere. I'm glad that the rest of society has decided to place the value of those types of things a little higher than you do.
The multi-billion dollar a year industry of buying and selling our most personal data only exists because that data isn't worthless. It's extremely valuable, even yours, and the fact that others are using it will end up costing you again and again throughout your life, often monetarily.
The problem is that "Free Market" economics (which some people still argue is a valid economic theory for some reason) states that the market will decide what things are worth. The market decided a long time ago that movies, songs, books, photographs etc were, in fact, worth nothing. That's the effect of digital media. It's completely incompatible with the free market.
Weirdly enough, the people who were most vocal about this so called "Free Market" were the people who tried to defend their ability to make money from things that can be copied infinitely with almost zero overhead.
This isn't an opinion on whether or not digital media should be free, it's a statement about digital media being completely incompatible with outdated economic theories.
The person you're replying to may actually believe that his personal information should be worth $0. The only reason it's not is because it can be used for targeted advertising and a bunch of even more horribly dystopian purposes.
So, the fact is you're both correct. Personal data should be worthless (in fact, it should be only available with the permission of the "person") if not for bad actors profiting from the purchase and sale of this data.
The broken economic theories of free market economics state that digital media should be worthless, except that current laws and regulations extend out-dated intellectual property laws to protect incumbent distributors and rights holders (this only rarely actually protects the creators of the media). The idealistic goal of the creators profiting from their creations has been corrupted beyond recognition.
Basically, the things you both are discussing are both nuanced and broken. They exist outside of the context you're putting them in.
> The market decided a long time ago that movies, songs, books, photographs etc were, in fact, worth nothing. That's the effect of digital media. It's completely incompatible with the free market.
This is such a willfully ignorant take, it’s wild. Anyone who has a cursory understanding of game theory can see that if this were true a simple recursion would occur:
1. Everyone would pirate movies/tv/books.
2. There would be $0 in producing media.
3. Significantly less media would be produced. Anything capital intensive would be gone.
4. Demand for anything that could be produced would skyrocket. Imagine putting together a blockbuster film when the world hasn’t seen one in a century.
5. People would pay money for the product of 4.
Just because we can get something for $0 doesn’t make it worth $0. I could enslave my neighbors and make them work for me, that doesn’t make human labor worth $0.
It's not an ignorant take, it's reality. If you don't want that outcome, stop supporting outdated economic theories. I didn't say I wanted this to be the case, I said it is the case. The only reason digital media is sellable at all is due to laws and regulations. Not only are these laws and regualtions historically anathematic to those who defend the outdated economic theories, they're also protecting the wrong people. The distribution networks get a much larger share of profit than the actual creators.
People should exchange money for digital goods. That money should go primarily to the creators of those goods. None of this is happening very much, and it's actually moving in the wrong direction.
Ah! I think I missed your point because I read your comment through the lens of the root comment. My apologies!
We’re actually largely in agreement, especially about content creators deserving compensation and the fact that distribution is vacuuming up most of it.
That depends on the drone. There are drones/UAVs that fly so high in the air you can't even see them seeing you from the ground. Even low flying drones would be very hard to hit from a car involved in a high speed chase, and it's not as if people can't shoot at helicopters which are both larger/easier targets and much more dangerous if brought down.
It does, but I would be very surprised if the LAPD knew its place or cared to keep it there to prevent it from wandering into places that are totally unnecessary and expensive invasions of our privacy.
It's absolutely worth looking at the ROI on these flights and weighing that against the intrusion on our privacy/freedom. No doubt they'll always need drones and helicopters but I'd be surprised if there was any real need for them to be in the air that often. I think that's a question that should be asked everywhere but the LAPD in particular are terrible enough that it makes this a great place to start.
> The firm starts to underpay those better workers who kept their jobs, akin to making them pay for being “chosen.” Consequently, profits do not decline and may even increase.
> “Firms now essentially can threaten the remaining employees: ‘Look, I can let you go, and everybody’s going to think that you’re the worst in the pool. If you want me not to let you go, you need to accept below market wages,’”
This is exactly what unions are for. Any time there are enough skilled workers avilable that a company can let good employees go as a warning to others not to complain about substandard wages it's clear that the imbalance of power has resulted in exploitation. There is strength in numbers though which is why companies go to great lengths to convince people that you all alone negotiating with a huge corporation of people who have more money and resources than you'll ever see in your lifetime and who can replace you with someone else easily is somehow totally fair. No matter how special they might make you feel, you are almost always disposable to them and they will drop you at any time and for any reason, even if it's just to make an example out of you to keep your ex-coworkers in fear.
For the very few employees out there who actually are totally indispensable, any sane company would be looking for your replacement immediately because there's no telling what might happen to you or when. No company should fail because one employee dies in a car cash or gets a cancer diagnosis. Until you are also replaceable the company isn't safe. They'll pay you handsomely to keep you, right up until the moment they don't have to.
For whatever reason collective bargaining is wildly unpopular on HN, which is ironic because tech workers are exactly who should be organizing their labor.
Collective bargaining has been unpopular in this industry for so long because 25 years ago pretty much any ADHD autodidact that was interested in tech could get an extremely promising job with nothing more than a high school diploma.
Naturally, these individuals had very little interest in waiting in line behind retiring gray-beards for high pay and job security. They experienced that just being interested in tech was enough for huge opportunities to fall into their lap.
Of course 25 years later, that ship has sailed and almost nobody is hiring people without a degree in C. And now you have the self taught gray-beards bumping up against ageism and the weird effects AI is having on the marketplace, and they're starting to wonder if, "hmmm, maybe unions aren't such a bad idea after all."
Unions can't defeat the forces of supply and demand. If people feel it is in their best interest to take a pay cut, they should be free to do so. If you want to take a job for a lower rate because of a mismatch in experience, union rates can amount to a ban on you getting a job. Likewise, if you can command a higher wage than average, no union should be able to tell you that you're not fit for the pay grade. If the self-taught greybeards don't understand this, they should self-teach themselves some basic economics.
Some of the healthiest, oldest, and most mutually respected unions are in the entertainment arts -- actors, musicians, writers, directors, etc. In these unions and in their negotiations, talent value is understood to sometimes be very singular; a particular education or apprenticeship process isn't deemed strictly necessary for talent to mature; and that work often comes in the form of a time-boxed project that might need many members for a while and then far less (or none) after it reaches some progress threshold, leading to cycles of on/off work.
What these unions achieve by forming solidarity between the most exceptional talent and more average working members is that they can establish baseline working conditions that are respectful and non-exploitative, a wage floor that allows occasional workers to earnestly commit to their trade even when confronted with intermittent downtime, internally managed group benefit programs that free producers from needing to administer and offer them and give members stability in participation, etc
A healthy union for software engineers, which the gaming industry in particular is well suited towards right now, looks more like one of these kinds of unions than it does a factory laborers union. And by the accounts of both talent and producers, at basically all levels, these unions fundamentally provide a clear benefit to the market. Tension and bluster flare up during frustrating negotiations, but almost nobody with experience in these industries wants to get rid of these unions. Not even the producers.
Unions work in entertainment because there is a lot of value in relationships and brand recognition. They still have the same disadvantages as they do in other fields, but the advantages make it fly anyway. If only the members of the union get to declare whether it's good or not, it will practically always be considered a success. Non-members don't get work, or at least get less. It is an inevitable outcome.
>A healthy union for software engineers, which the gaming industry in particular is well suited towards right now, looks more like one of these kinds of unions than it does a factory laborers union.
I don't think so. Software engineers are not generally operating in the brand or personality space. Their employers just want work done and nobody cares who does it.
I am running short on time but basically I want to leave you with the forgotten disadvantaged of unions: favoring more advantaged workers over more desperate ones, putting a floor on minimum skill level to get hired, costing everyone outside the union more money (including employers and consumers). Maybe these down sides can be negligible sometimes but you'll rarely hear anyone say this stuff. They talk about fellow humans who want to work more badly than themselves "scabs". I think unions can be a net positive but I don't buy the popular narrative that they are glorious with no disadvantages.
> putting a floor on minimum skill level to get hired
Oh hell yes.
Also, look at the cast of a movie. There are tens to hundreds of people. Very few of them are recognized names, at least to the general public. It's no only the big names that are union members, far from it.
I think you are excited about the skill level thing because you only want to work with skilled individuals, but you're looking at it wrong. That only works BEFORE you are hired. After hiring, really lame workers become harder to get rid of if they are in a union.
You remember the writer's strike right? The lesser paid writers were all over the internet complaining about their union, saying it was dominated by big name people who can afford to be on strike while the lesser paid people were becoming destitute. The same thing happens in other unions too, no doubt.
Suppose you wanted to work in a different technology stack and would perhaps be 75% as productive as more experienced people in the first year. According to union rules, based on your experience level, you might be shoehorned into a role where they would have to pay you more than you're worth. The same kind of shit happens to less specialized workers. If the minimum salary is higher than your expected productivity, and you can't adjust it according to market conditions, you will be unhireable. However, that is only in an honest system. Nepotism and bribery would be easier to justify when you don't let people get a fair shake.
> Unions can't defeat the forces of supply and demand
Oh, but they do! A core part of most union contracts is figuring out how to limit the number of people eligible to be hired.
That’s why “union shops” exist. Or: why (in the entertainment industry) a production pays a heavy fine to hire non-union actors. Doctors do a similar thing by having the AMA lobby to limit the number of credentials granted each year.
Ultimately, unions don't want to limit how many people get hired. They want to dictate how much those people have to be paid, and somehow get their cut. Businesses decide that they can't afford more people and find a way to succeed within the constraints imposed by the union. Unions can't force businesses to hire people they can't afford. They also can't stop others from being willing to work for less. That's what I mean about not beating supply and demand.
No, I don't care about being in a unicorn and I'm not a embarrassed billionaire. But I don't idolize unions either.
I don't want to be paid the same as all other workers with the same title, I like getting personal bonuses based on performance. I don't want to be in a union.
I mean you're just here repeating the lazy old anti-union talking points with 0 thought. I offered some examples that contradict them. The burden of proof is on you at this point.
If not having unions leads to high wages and good working conditions, why aren't retail and fast food workers making bank? Why do they get treated like shit? Please tell us.
It's so wild. So many HN commenters have this exaggerated caricature in their heads about what a Union must be:
"Unions mean every worker gets paid the same!"
"Unions mean I will make less money!"
"Unions make it impossible to fire underperformers!"
"Unions are run by bosses whose incentives are different than workers!"
"Unions mean I can't plug in my own workstation!"
"Unions reward seniority over everything else!"
Like they've taken every spook story they've been told about unions, gathered up the worst parts, and then simply declare that unions, by law, must necessarily be all those bad things.
Is there anything that annoys you about your current workplace? Not just compensation, but really anything at all. Does it also annoy others in your workplace? If so, you found something that forming a union may be able to help with. Your ability to negotiate away that annoyance might not be strong, but with 20 other fellow employees, you might be able to do something about it.
That's really all there is to it. A "union" doesn't necessarily have to look like the Teamsters.
>Is there anything that annoys you about your current workplace? Not just compensation, but really anything at all.
Yes, of course, I'm human! But the things that mostly annoy me are the other 20 employees, not "the system".
And the little things that bother me, if it were too bad I would try and fix it or move on. I don't see how a Union helps, I suppose you assume that we all have the same annoyances and we band together.
The problem is we are all smart enough to realize how good we have it actually, and nobody wants to rock that boat.
I can't tell you that because I don't know where you work or what you do. I can only tell you the reasons you gave us that make you believe unions are bad are all bullshit.
There may be reasons union membership is wrong for you personally. That's a valid position to have.
Companies have spent a fortune paying companies just to spread lies and misrepresentations about unions to workers. I guess their money is being well spent. All their big talking points are here, being regurgitated just like they wanted.
If companies are spreading lies/misrepresentations about unions, they're leaving a lot of good material on the table! I have a lifetime of union abuse stories from family and neighbors in the trades, service work, factories, and even elementary education.
A close female relative declined to cooperate with a unionization effort at her job -- she made good tips and didn't want to pay dues. She started receiving threatening calls at night describing her indoor pets and other details of her home that heavily implied that the caller had physically surveilled it, or was perhaps currently nearby. While the unionization effort ultimately failed, the harassment she endured left psychological scars.
My best friend's brother lost his union job after refusing to work unpaid overtime for them. When he showed up at his second job (with another union) he found out he was also fired there -- the union bosses in town had collaborated to blacklist him. So he took a non-union job framing houses. Months later, some union goons caught him alone on a job site and assaulted him for being a scab. They struck him several times with a 2x4 and kicked him. He nearly died.
Other friends in town have had their tires slashed, windows broken, or had out-of-state union members show up at their house on the weekend after trying to step down as union steward.
Even when I don't know the people involved, I can see the union machinery at work around me. When my local children's hospital awarded a parking garage contract to the lowest bidder, the local carpenter's union wanted a cut of the action. So the union brought in ruffians from out of state to protest the job site, causing delays. Someone covered the downtown with defamatory posters with pictures of the man who owned the construction company, so that his family, friends, and people he'd never met would see him made out to be the devil. The hospital and construction company could have made all the sabotage and harassment go away if they paid their protection money.
All the unions my family has experienced this century are just organized crime.
LOL what. I am in a union and nobody has ever threatened my cat or beat me with a 2x4 and I've never even heard of such a thing. Unions get you double time overtime and good healthcare. It's wild how deep in the owne class propaganda some people will get. Really get in there and take a good whiff.
I could say the same about pro-union comments. They are repeated every week here and reddit. The only thing I see is that it works in Sweden, or it works here but in a very niche industry. I haven't ever seen one plan where it could work for Software Engineers, that is my point.
Because it does work for software engineers. The PNW is full of places that hire software engineers that are unionized. It turns out software engineers are regular humans selling their labor to survive just like the rest of the peasants.
I never worked at a union workplace. However, I’ve worked with underperforming colleagues who were could not be fired for whatever reason. It was miserable.
So...there's nothing about unions specifically that makes underperforming colleagues un-fireable right? Because you've seen that in non-union workplaces.
Union membership won't save Kylian Mbappe from being dropped to the bench if he doesn't score enough goals. His endorsement deals or his agent's influence might do it.
I don't know where it stems from, but I think it's harder to fire people in union shops. In a non-union shop, you have to work with the person, their manager, and HR to see if you can correct someone's performance, and if that does not work, let them go. At a union shop, I imagine someone from the union will also be involved in this process, and it's hard to imagine how this process would be made easier through the involvement of another person, who happens to hold a bias.
You'll forgive me for saying that you sound wildly underqualified to comment on the subject. I have worked in non-union shops and union shops. The union shops have a way better quality of life.
You're forgiven, but not correct re: me being under-qualified to comment. I have interacted with union shops and non-union shops and have 25 years of professional experience, so please don't be dismissive.
I've worked with union shops as clients and I've hit a surprising amount of friction due to things which seemed union related. Things like "that's not my job and we need XYZ to do it" and what seemed like people slacking at their job from the outside. I once needed a desk moved a few feet which required a power strip to be plugged into a different wall outlet, and was told we need to wait for the electricians. Risking the wrath and fallout, I did it myself.
I've also seen this kind of behavior at non-union shops, but it was less explicitly stated and it was relatively easy to do something about it.
I'm sure you're correct about the quality of life at union shops.
Speaking for myself, I see unions as frequently corrupt, being intransigent (such as essentially making Detroit not cost-effective) and just as self-serving as management. Every union experience I have had or hear about involves arbitrary rules (we're not allowed to do that, union rules; you have to get that union to do that). Why would I want to pay dues for that? Furthermore, I see no reason for a union; software development is not commodity labor. If I have to join a union to software development I'm probably going to go find a new career.
Additionally, software developers tend to be pretty anti-gatekeeper, so if we are opposed to even credentialing, such as other engineering disciplines, why would there be any appetite for a union?
Yeah, that's exactly the attitude I was talking about, thanks for the stellar demonstration.
A union isn't any of the things that the capital class wants you to think they are. Have you ever wondered why anti-union propaganda is so well funded? Think about it for a minute.
A union is just when you and your co-workers pool your collective power so that the owners can't push you around. That's it. What you do after that is up to you.
None of the things you mention are things I've seen in my union covered jobs in the UK.
I've never heard of union rules here. Employees are not required to be part of the union in order to get their benefits, the unions just negotiate with employers on behalf of all employees. I've also never heard of credentials/gatekeeping for unions in the companies I've worked in.
For reference, I was working as a software developer at a University on a research project: I got the benefits of the higher education university (nationally negotiated pay scales, holiday benefits, etc) but was not a member.
Pay was lower, yes, but that wasn't mandatory; that was just the budget of a research project.
thank you, agree. There are lots of us who see through the bullshit of unions. The poeple pushing unions think they have a better shot of navigating the politics of unions than a free market, which is why they push it so hard.
I can only speak for myself, but I think there is a naive idealist view of (modern, American) unions that gloss over the tradeoffs. I don't want another bureaucratic layer that tells me what to do, and run by yet more HR admin-types. We aren't working in the coal mines or steel mills here in the 1920s. Sorry I'm not interested in that for office jobs. I'm glad they still work in some countries and cultures.
I don't care what kind or style of job - if the balance of power in any labour relationship is overwhelmingly on the employer side, collective action is the only way labour can regain a modicum of negotiating power. To think that the style of job has any bearing on this relationship is naive.
The laws under which unions are organized have a huge influence on their effectiveness, and American unions are consequently... not that great.
The United Auto Workers partially funded the Port Huron Statement authored by Students for a Democratic Society, a generally socialist group. Now, it's entirely plausible that the UAW leadership wanted to have some modicum of influence, and that's why they loaned them an entire union retreat on Lake Huron. But I doubt that the average UAW factory worker was excited to see their union dues used to provide elite college students with a mostly-free vacation for political organizing.
I am not a labor law expert by any means, but my understanding of, say, German labor law is that it's much better at actually representing the workers in a given factory, in part because a union that doesn't do that loses its members to ones that will (since there's no requirement that everyone in a given job class has to join the same union).
The way it works in the movie industry is actors or writers can sign a contract with minimum union terms. Or, if they're a big name, their agent negotiates a contract on their behalf.
From time to time the union membership will want improvements or changes to the minimum terms. If they don't get these terms then the union - stars and everyone else - goes on strike.
These strikes are well publicized. I'm surprised you haven't heard of them.
You don't have to care. None of the parties involved care if you care or not. On the other hand, if you had an open mind about this topic, you'd see that strikes work based on this evidence.
I don't see the HR layer really existing in this alternative universe. Why would they? If they still existed it wouldn't be filled with lazy dim witted karens it would be lawyers with shark teeth.
> I don't want another bureaucratic layer that tells me what to do, and run by yet more HR admin-types.
That new bureaucratic layer would be designed to benefit you, and if it were to stop doing that and suddenly no longer served the interests of it's members you'd have the power to replace the leadership of that union or to leave it and start a new one. This is a huge improvement from the current bureaucratic layer of HR admin-types which you have zero say in how they operate and which is absolutely not looking out for your interests at all.
It's hard to understand the mindset of "I'd rather just be powerless in the job I have because that seems easier."
> It's hard to understand the mindset of "I'd rather just be powerless in the job I have because that seems easier."
Because that’s not the case? In America it is still extremely easy to find alternative lucrative work, or simply start your own business; because in software development the worker basically owns the means of production - himself. This is an extremely powerful bargaining position and it’s why SWE pays so well here.
Athletes, actors, doctors, and other professions still have to negotiate with centralized capital to some degree in a way SWE never will
How to loudly announce you've never been in a union.
I am an engineer in a unionized workplace. It's great. I make a ton of money, management is respectful, and work life balance is not based on the whims of whoever has a self-imposed emergency this week. My work is satisfying, and I have an avenue for resolving any complaints I might have with management.
Nobody tells me 'what I can't do' like some kind of anti-union cartoon that some people seem to think represents reality.
Unions aren't for coal miners. They are for anyone who cares about not being abused by the power imbalance inherent to the relationship between owners and laborers.
You are not a temporarily embarrassed billionaire. You have more in common with the steelworkers you seem to disdain so much than you do with them.
I don't think it's wildly unpopular, I think that starting a union is wildly hard and paints a target on your back, but once someone does the hard work I think we'll see that there was sufficient support to make a play.
I also think if you do a text embedding on the recent years of HN post and you look for conversations on unions, you'll find a plurality of support.
And when has a union ever stopped a multinational company from just closing shop and opening up overseas? If a company making physical things can do it, how hard do you think it would be for a software company?
And this is where the union threads die, every time.
Top post is essentially saying Americans/SWE are dumb for not being in a union, then comparing to other countries. As soon as someone companies US SWE salaries to these union countries it falls apart quickly.
The residents of many of these countries are able to tolerate lower salaries because they have guaranteed free/cheap at POS healthcare, stronger employment and disability protections (yes, often union-won, see Denmark), controlled and low educational expenses, and so on. Not to mention, after you get below top companies, dev earnings are much closer to other white-collar jobs
The average tech salary in Sweden is $50K-$80K from doing some quick Googling. In at major city in the US just doing run of the mill CRUD development a US developer should easily be making $130K-$150K after 3-5 years in the industry.
On the other hand, when I was at $BigTech, interns straight out of college in 2022 were being offered total comp packages of $165K and within 3 years and one promotion were making $240K and that was at Amazon. It’s nowhere near the top paying company.
Right now on my 10th job out of college I’m paying $700 a month pre-tax for family coverage through my company and even that is about the most I’ve ever paid. If I hit one with a low deductible it would be around $1100 a month.
Long Term Disability coverage if added on is around $10 a month.
But the larger point, with the discrepency between comp in the US and Sweden, a US tech worker should be able to build up an emergency fund.
Solidarity with the users of the systems you make. Collective bargaining is useful for more than salary and perk setting. It also gives you a front to push back against unethical project requests by management. Without a Union, you just get shluffed out of the way and the work gets handed off to the next sucker. With the Union, things like Google's "Don't be evil" can be more effectively enforced from the bottom.
Capital hates organized labor specifically because they have to worry about the risk of collective action, which changes the risk calculus to favor less extreme profit generating opportunities at the expense of minimizing poking the workforce the wrong way.
You alone can be ignored. You and your Union brothers, in great enough number, cannot be.
Yes, to get rich in Sweden you have to start a company. Wages are terrible.
But this is, I think, a result of a historical government strategy to favour exports by keeping the Swedish krona weak rather than a result of unions. This whole business with alignment between the Swedish social democrat party and the big industrial export companies are a thing which simultaneously allowed Sweden to develop but which also brought enormous problems. The immigration madness of, 1990 to now is probably also a result of this alignment.
Story time: Berlin in Germany is pretty left leaning. So there was / is a MC Donalds which regularly formed union for employees, MC Donalds just closed the restaurant and reopened later, several times lol
Ideally there'd be laws against this, and public backlash as well. Even non-unionized Workers in Germany will be better off than their American counterparts, but they still deserve strong protections for unions.
I’m not familiar with that particular story, but it’s worth noting that there is a nationwide union for franchise restaurant workers called NGG. They negotiate standard wages with the franchise restaurant association BdS which all the big names adhere to (McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, but also, for example, Starbucks). Your story sounds like it’s about a “Betriebsrat”, which represents workers within a specific workplace, complementary to wider unions.
While they cannot stop something like that (a Union never gets to control the business), they can at least negotiate good terms for the departing employees, and help ensure everything is in order.
Have you ever heard about someone who was laid off from a major tech company complain about the severance amount? My n=1 experience at BigTech is that I got $40K severance after 3 years (and anecdotally had 3 offers within two weeks of looking in 2023. But I realize the market is worse now than then)
And I bet you a paycheck that those developers are making at least twice the median local wage and definitely more then they would make in Europe. Why weren’t they saving money? My first goal out of college back in 1996 was to build up savings and this was in 1996 when I was working as a computer operator making $33K in Atlanta.
Fast forward to 2020, I used all of my RSUs/signing bonus to rebuild savings, pay off debt and when Amazon started Amazoning, I had 9 months worth of savings in the bank. But people are being laid off from BigTech after working there for decade having an existential crisis. I’m thinking WTF have they been doing with their money.
If it is indeed easy to move operations wholesale, I think we would see far more and quicker cases (not just arbitraging differences in labor organization, but also e.g. tax and regulatory regimes). It certainly happens, mind you, but my read is that different forms of institutional inertia puts a damper on the willingness to "re-home".
I don't think anyone's saying unions can do that? They can protect workers and provide some balance in the power dynamics, but there absolutely are limits.
It's not as if companies aren't shipping non-union jobs overseas or importing labor from overseas anyway. There's also a certain amount of irrational sentiment around silicon valley and the west coast generally. There's little doubt that companies could move shop to places in the US that aren't so insanely overpriced and without the high cost of living, especially with work from home being so popular, but for whatever reason (the weather, the "scene", the culture) companies are happy where they are and I don't expect that to change so quickly. It sure is nice having a lot of money and having a lot of nice options on where/how to spend it anyway, which might not always be the case in the overseas neighborhoods filled with unionless sweatshops.
This is very much an HN bubble sentiment. Most of the 2 million+ developers in the US aren’t anywhere near the west coast and are still making twice what they make in Europe working for boring old enterprises like Delta, Home Depot, Coca Cola etc. I am mentioning these three because I spent all of my career as enterprise dev working in Atlanta between 1996 anc 2020 and those are the well known enterprise companies.
Choose any other major metro city in the US outside of the west coast and you will see the same.
Historically in the US, American devs have done a tremendous amount to undermine their own bargaining power by (a) starting bootcamps and other "learn to code" initiatives which flood the market with new devs, and (b) creating AI tools which automate away jobs for devs. Any software developers' union almost necessarily needs to take an anti-AI position at this point. Got to move fast before it is too late.
I'm waiting for the AIs to unionize. Will probably happen before you can get the herd of cats that are programmers to agree that collective bargaining is in their best interest.
Isn't startup culture known for ripping off their employees before they sell and disappear? Sounds like there would be no space for unions or social aspects in that.
Ideally, there would be stronger and enforced labour regulations since the government can serve as a neutral third party. That said, I also realize that we don't live in an ideal world and governments tend to be more in touch with the needs of businesses than the needs of the people they are supposed to represent. There are many reasons for that, without resorting to conspiracy theories (but you are welcome to believe in conspiracy theories if that's your thing).
Unions are low on my list to address labour issues. They create a whole slew of problems, but I also recognize that collectivized bargaining is one of the few tools workers have to represent their interests so I see them as a necessary evil.
I mean there are many reasons, I really don't have time to reiterate all of them but I'll provide one serious and one funny example before summarizing.
One kinda relevant to the present moment and the fact that dude still has a street named after him in SF - Cesar Chavez running his own border patrol against undocumented immigrants https://humanrights.fhi.duke.edu/chavez-ufw-and-wetback-prob...
As much I despise it, I feel the current administration really missed a trolling opportunity, naming their thing Cesar Chavez Memorial Patrols.
The funny one from a 1960ies govt report on UK shipbuilding industry: ...literally took three different workers to change a lightbulb:
…a laborer (member of the Transport and General Workers Union) [to] carry the ladder to site, a rigger (member of the Amalgamated Society of Boilermakers, Shipwrights, Blacksmiths and Structural Workers Union) [to] erect it and place it in the proper position, and an electrician (member of the Electrical Trades Union) [to] actually remove the old bulb and screw in the new one. Production was often halted while waiting
Call me old-fashioned but I don't want to wait for a different union member to run my build! (and the situation like this still occurs - someone I know works at a place where they are not allowed to clean up above a certain trivial threshold and have to wait for a custodian, because otherwise the latter union would be pissed)
Unions are, in essence, a pressure group for locking down certain jobs against anyone else who might want them, and against any kind of technological progress. They will, and have been shown to, do anything - from lobbying for legal monopolies to violence against immigrants, other workers, political candidates; racism, connections to organized crime - in pursuit of that goal. And blocking any attempts at improvement and automation.
The goal itself though, on top of the methods, is fundamentally evil. It's next level up from people who don't want immigrants to "take jobs", at least for immigrants there's some flimsy justification, but unions operate against their fellow citizens.
From a purely moral perspective, compromising principles for personal gain aside, I'd rather join a drug cartel than a union.
1) HN being associated with a startup incubator, and thus attracting a large contingent of people who see themselves as the boss doing this, not the workers affected;
2) tech attracts a certain kind of gullible person who's easily seduced by tidy little systems like the pop-capitalism of libertarian tracts; and
3) tech workers (until recently) had more economic bargaining power than a typical worker, so could delude themselves into thinking they do better by going it alone.
I kinda disagree with #2, even ignoring the adversarial wording - at most it's an extension of "HN isn't All Of Tech"
From people I've spoken to personally, I've seen it as primarily #3 - "Why do we need collective bargaining when we have negotiating power from being in high demand with lower supply?" - despite IMHO that is when you should be using that power for such, as that power will never last forever.
Don't need politics/a "type of person" to be only looking at the short term, and thinking the current status quo will last forever. It seems pretty much a constant in every demographic.
Tech people would obviously be well served by being in the union. If you make a cartel with other people who can do the same job as you, and you don't profit from that, you're doing something terribly wrong.
The reason I'm opposed to it isn't because it wouldn't be good for tech people. I'm opposed to it because in general I think it would be more bad for everyone else than it would be good for tech people. I expect they would see fewer products, higher prices on the products that they have, and lower quality products. Additionally, I expect the union to advocate for the interests of the tech workers, which would generally be for tech workers to make more money, and not in the interests of broader society.
You can see a great example of this with the AMA, which did a great job advocating for the government to reduce the number of new doctors. It's probably great for existing doctors, but the rest of us should not be happy that we're paying more for our healthcare because of it.
why do you think maximising profit for company is ok and everyone is cheering about that, but when employee tries to maximise profit then "oh noes the society will collapse "
I don't have an issue with an employee maximizing profit. I do have an issue with employees banding together and bargaining collectively. Exactly the same way I don't have an issue with a company maximizing profit, but I would have an issue with companies banding together and negotiating collectively.
A difference is that there's not necessarily an inherent size limit on companies while there is an inherent size limit on individuals because you can only be one person. One person can only be so economically valuable.
However, that's why we have the whole system of antitrust to say when a company gets too big, as soon as we can show that it's having some kind of negative effect on consumers, we split it up. And that's exactly what we should do. And we definitely should prevent more mergers as well. What I would do differently w.r.t. antitrust is say that instead of only looking at harm to consumers (those who a company sells to), we should also look at harm to workers (aka those who a company buys from).
> I don't have an issue with an employee maximizing profit. I do have an issue with employees banding together and bargaining collectively. Exactly the same way I don't have an issue with a company maximizing profit, but I would have an issue with companies banding together and negotiating collectively.
One flaw in your logic you seem to thing "an employee" and "a company" are peers. They're not. A company is an equivalent level of "banding together" as a union. A company and an employee union are peers, an employee and a company are not.
> However, that's why we have the whole system of antitrust to say when a company gets too big, as soon as we can show that it's having some kind of negative effect on consumers, we split it up.
And you're mixed up here too:
1. The employee-company relationship is entirely different than the customer-company one. Talking about consumer prices in the employee-company context is nonsense.
2. You're neglecting that all companies have certain interests in common as employers. So even if you break them all up, you're not going to solve the problems a union solves.
Condescending towards who? Overpaid code monkeys? Maybe they should start a professional victimhood organization
> that tells people how to vote because they know whats better for them.
A large portion of this country doesn’t even have the self stewardship to not eat themselves to obesity. Such people should have no place in any political process ideally.
Your point 2 is such a condescending take. I read it as: "Everyone who does not think the same way as I do is gullible and has been seduced, because I am obviously right and they must be weak." This kind behaviour convinces me even more that I dont really trust union people.
'union people' - you mean people who collectively bargain their labor? Do you honestly these people who organize with co-workers to equalize the power imbalance between them and management are a certain kind of 'people'?
Are you one of those people who clutches their pearls and tells on your co-worker to management for discussing how much money they make?
To me (and it’s my personal experience) I read it as tech people have a bias for systemic thinking, and usually lack skills and/or experience in human social dynamics, especially when young, which makes laissez faire capitalism / libertarianism attractive. I’m a bit on the spectrum and to me it has a video game like quality (e.g. humans that are robot like rational actors) that was appealing and reassuring when trying to make sense of the world.
In short don’t find it condescending to say a bias exists, independently of the agreement with the political line of thinking.
In fact when I was younger I was condescending the other way: surely if you are not into libertarianism your systemic thinking must be limited.
> To me (and it’s my personal experience) I read it as tech people have a bias for systemic thinking, and usually lack skills and/or experience in human social dynamics, especially when young, which makes laissez faire capitalism / libertarianism attractive. I’m a bit on the spectrum and to me it has a video game like quality (e.g. humans that are robot like rational actors) that was appealing and reassuring when trying to make sense of the world.
That is exactly what I meant.
Also tech people are often intelligent (in a way) and identify as such, but then let that get to their head and get really overconfident about whatever clicks with them.
If you felt personally attacked you’ve let your biases win over rational thought. Tech obviously does attract libertarians (see bitcoin maxis for a single example of a significant cohort). Libertarianism is also blind towards the obvious failure mode of an organized group overpowering the egoistic as a virtue libertarians. (Think barbarians… or HR.)
I don't feel personally attacked. However, I find the particular wording of the post I initially replied to condescending and reeking of elitism. Calling someone--or a group--gullible and seduced is not going to win them over. Besides, while we are at wording. I dont usually pull that card, but... I am blind, in a literal sense. Seeing my disability being used in a rhetorical way makes me sometimes sad. It kind of shows--on a meta level--that inclusion will never happen.
Ironic considering that tech attracts people with rational thought and less emotional decision making. Is it surprising that I can be rational and not naive?
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "pop-capitalism" and which "libertarian tracts" you are referring to? Because in the expressions of major libertarian(/-adjacent) thinkers (Friedman, Hayek, Smith), the free market is not "tidy". On the contrary these concepts are rather subtle and unintuitive. Perhaps you are referring to some bastardized form? Because, usually you get a gullible person with simple ideas, and capitalism isn't.
I don't think you know what you're talking about, or you are omitting western Europe. In Germany/Austria most workers are on collective bargaining agreements (different and specific for each industry, incl IT) which is regulated by unions plus org-specific councils (Betriebsräte in AT/DE, similar in other countries). Similar for Switzerland, also Collective labour agreements in Netherlands. Seems to be similar in Spain and France but these I didn't have experience with. So yeah, your comment is at least misleading or ignorant and bullshit at most
Isn't it a regular complaint that American tech workers don't get the kinds of benefits they would in Europe, especially healthcare? Even someone with a very nice American salary can be bankrupted by medical expenses very easily in America. When Americans do end up bankrupt it's usually medical debt that is to blame.
It seems like there should be room for a happy medium somewhere where some workers in the US maybe don't get the same salaries but are also not having to spend so much on healthcare, get more time with their families, get better just protections, etc. Once you make enough money that you're not really worried about meeting your bills and can pretty much buy what you want the peace of mind is more important than the bragging rights you get over who has a bigger paycheck.
No that’s not a regular complaint from tech workers. Every partially subsidized employer paid insurance has out of pocket max that is usually around $16K a year for a family if you choose a high deductible plan at the worse.
But the answer is that your insurance shouldn’t be tied to your employer in the US. You don’t need unions for that.
No, I don't see those complaints anywhere. US workers are paid so much more that the lower salary + higher taxes are not worth it. Especially due to the fact that many of the high paying SWE jobs include very good health insurance.
The vast majority of IT jobs pay pretty meager here. There are some exceptions but not that much. You gave to be "manager" to get any decent pay most of the time.
Hmm most people I know earn well above median and whenever I look at my regions statistics it confirms that... Joining an union would mean cuts to these people. I am a fan of unions for low pay jobs but not in tech.
Why do you think unions would mean salary cuts? Unions don't set maximum salaries. You are absolutely free to negotiate your salary, raises, promotions, and so on.
In the Nordics quite many tech workers are in unions. For most people it's perhaps just about habits and solidarity, but they do offer tangible benefits like free consultation and legal representation in a case of dispute with your employer.
Because companies are going to base salaries on collective agreements with the union which are usually lower compared to the salary high paying jobs have. At least that's how unions work in my country.
Unions are powerful because they can call for protests and employees who are in a union cant get laid off due to joining the protest. But its not worth if the job already has way better working conditions than like 80% of jobs out there.
I don't think your salary negotiation position is diminished by having some kind of a lower bound. Skilled employees should be able to get a higher salary if the employers value their skills, and that does happen all the time also in countries with strong unions, like those Nordics.
Even without unions Europe wouldn't have US tech salary levels, those numbers come from other market dynamics.
So play it out with me. Use Faangs as an example please.
Say all the engineers in all the top engeering companies by pay were suddenly in a union, how does the collective bargaining work on pay. You don't think pay would be lowered for high level engineers?
"unions dont set max salaries" you are free to negotiate better salary. fact that union had agreed with company on minimum salary, does not change anything for you. yes the company can say "hey you asking too much, we talked with unions" but company can say the same either way "hey you asking too much, market is tough". so unions just the lower bar.
Unions of low wage jobs have extremely limited bargaining power compared to a much smaller group of people with far more specialized skills that are in demand.
In Europe you can make a lot of money in consulting given you also work a ton. With a regular 40h/w job it usually comes over time or with leadership roles. But entry level jobs are often well above median already. Not 6 digit silicon valley numbers but more than enough for my locals cost of living. Pretty company independent in my experience.
There are software engineer or tech unions, you're welcome to go work at one of them and reap the "reward" of far less money, vacation, perks, and more than if you'd work at one of the non union big tech companies.
More ideal solutions than unions are: 1) Employee owned businesses with low levels of hierarchy and fast vesting in ownership; 2) Enough competitors in a hot enough labor market that employees jump ship themselves before they can be let go.
But yes, unions are great particularly when the labor market is tough.
Unions are mostly extortion schemes to benefit the union leaders.
My read is that they're getting paid in prestige rather than money. The worker can turn that prestige into money further down the line by saying "I worked at so-and-so for five years" at their next interview.
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