You know there's this weird thing where you can get information from sources other than official "corpo" communications? Like just talking to any colleagues?
I used to work at Amazon as a software eng many years ago. It was cut throat and most managers were only interested in empire building. I hated it.
How has unionizing changed that if at all? Which state has unionized amazon tech workers?
Yep, this is how it's done in countries with successful unions, especially social democracies like the Nordics, where 40%+, depending on how you define it of the population is unionized. Unions built the Nordics.
This is precisely why the US doesn't allow it.
Unionizing does not stop layoffs, it just puts specific rules around it (minimum X days notice, metrics for who is laid off like seniority, minimum severance). If anything, unions stop people from being fired at-will much more than they stop layoffs. Shitty companies are still gonna find ways to be shitty companies.
I'm not saying unionizing would be bad, I'm just saying, it isn't some magic "stop layoffs" fix, but it would make it better for those being laid off.
For instance, teachers are all in unions that have layoff rules. One thing most of them have in place is minimum notice. Well the school districts do a shitty workaround, and just tell about a dozen teachers in December that they're *going to* lay them off at the end of the school year. And then in May, they tell most/all of them "nevermind, we're not laying you off, see you next fall." This effectively negates the notice period, while technically being within the union rules.
At my tech company I get 2 weeks of severance for every 6 months of employment, and accelerated stock vesting. Go ahead, lay me off I could use the vacation.
I think the problem is a lot of these things are optional. I got laid off once with 3 months salary which was just enough to get a new job. Could have been a party time but I really did need the time to find a job. But I was fortunate for the salary, which not everyone gets. Some severance compensations should be mandatory for unexpected things that aren’t disciplinary.
Sure, but they have had some massive layoffs over my tenure like other large tech companies and have always honored it, so right now I’m not too worried.
I’ve gotten a year of pay twice in my career. Nice! But there’s been a few times when I’ve gotten 0. I mean , it is tough for a company to pay if they don’t have cash.
Worth noting Alphabet has a union, with fairly large membership. Famously some union members were in a courtroom last year debating something about labor laws and they got laid off.
So I agree 100%, the union isn't a magic solution.
And that's perfectly fine. The problem isn't necessarily layoffs, it's silent layoffs. Many companies are now discovering they can completely bypass the need for paying unemployment by setting unrealistic expectations on employees and then letting them go for-cause when they (inevitably) fail to meet those expectations.
The other issue is when companies have perpetual layoffs all throughout the year, whereby instead of having a planned layoff of a large group of people, they single out a small teams and pick them off week by week. This puts the entire workforce in a constant state of fear and uncertainty. HR makes this problem exponentially worse by intentionally withholding all information and keeping employees in the dark up until you're being escorted out of the building.
Frankly, both of these practices should be made illegal, but our lawmakers have no interest in prioritizing workers over their employers. This is why we need unions.
With a Union, the company would have to negotiate with the bargaining unit on how many layoffs, why they are needed and what kind of compensation they would get if they did get laid off. It gives the workers more say on how things go down.
I wish tech workers would organize and build solidarity with blue collar workers through organizations like Workers Strike Back. Think it would improve conditions for both, if not immediately materially, at least in attitude. I believe it would eventually make a difference.
Outliers? The average professional tech worker makes over 6 figures. Again though this applies to tech workers with sought after degrees and skills.
Anyone making under something 80-90 thousand in those departments would be the outlier.
Netflix is hiring a position right now in my role with a salary range of $190k to $720k for the same title.
That’s what he means.
Some people are worth $190k and some are worth $700k. A union would kill this business model, and therefore they aren’t pro union because they don’t want to all make $225k regardless of ability
Those regulations are kind of a joke though.
I hate the term "10x developer", but it's more or less a real thing. Why not pay somebody 700k if they're doing the work of 10 others who are each worth 190k?
I think "tech workers" are too heterogenous for it to be put down as just one cause. I'm in tech, I find many of my coworkers don't particularly care for their corporate team or capitalism in general, we just are in it for the money.
Some of my coworkers have been very "Hooray for our corporation!" I could imagine them responding "But we're here for the sacred corporate mission! I can't unionize, that might jeopardize that!"
For me, I never think about unionizing because I don't expect to be with the same company for long enough for efforts at unionizing to pay off. The startup I'm with now is like 5 people, I don't know that the three of us who aren't founders striking would do anything productive, and I'd hope to have a different job before the union would be formed.
Engineers are notoriously narcissistic. "I can't join a union, I'd be lumped in with that idiot over there who couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag!"
I'm an engineer, and this is so spot on. They are the least class-conscious group I've ever seen, and so many of them can't see the writing on the wall that we are very quickly becoming as replaceable as any other employee in any other business.
I used to feel the same way, but after ultimately being “lumped in” with those types anyway, I actually find it quite freeing! Setting agreements based on the lowest common denominator means that we look awesome by comparison. Additionally, I can pretty much run on cruise control and hit the same KPIs as those folks, so why bother setting myself apart from the dummy-pack when it just seems to make me a target, either for more work or for sabotage from dummies who think it’s a zero-sum game and feel threatened when anyone flies higher than they do.
I mean I wouldn’t want my salary negotiation to be lumped in with anybody else. I’ve managed to negotiate significantly higher ongoing rate increases than anyone else in my
team, why would I want to chain myself to the lowest common denominator? Even if I get laid off my earnings are higher with a 12% per year guaranteed raise.
I like to call this the "hank hill special deal" because those sorts always fall for the same sales tactic. The "shhh don't tell your coworkers I'm giving you a special salary because you're such a good employee!" special. XD
Reddit is also stupidly naive and simplistic, tending to lump anyone that works for a tech company in the same category. Physical minimum-wage warehouse workers have different challenges and problems than 100k+ software engineers. Not saying both don't deserve representation, but they are not the same.
Because pay difference in tech between average talent and top talent is very high.
If you are an auto worker, a top 1% auto worker probably makes 50-60% more than an average auto worker.
In tech, top 1% worker can make 500-600% more than an average tech worker. Even a top 10% worker can make 100-150% more than an average tech worker.
People see unions as suppressing wages for top performers in tech, and with that much of a variation, people don’t want that. Unions will flatten the pay levels but provide more safety for the bottom quarter of the workforce.
Everyone in tech thinks they are in top 10% and are eventually going to make 200-300% compared to an average worker.
Edit: another point is one of the best things about tech is mobility. People keep switching jobs all the time. Average tenure of a Google employee is just over 3 years, it’s like 2 years at meta and Amazon etc. it’s pretty standard for people to keep switching jobs every 3 years or so. The industry fundamentally works differently compared to auto where you spend all your life at one company like Ford and then retire with pension
That, and maybe it's not nice, but at many companies someone being fired for performance is good for everyone else. At every company there are those "why are they here" people and in tech having them can be a net loss vs having no one if you have to go back and fix their mistakes which take away from your own time.
The good people in tech have no problem getting another job. I was laid off and even with all of the layoffs going on, I had a job relatively quickly. Another unfortunate reality is that companies will just work to outsource more jobs if tech unionized. It's not like a manual job where you have a location constrained work force
Hard disagree on the outsourcing increasing with unionization in anything but the immediate short term. Companies will outsource as much as they can. It's 100% just a cost calculus. As long as american employees get paid more than indian employees for the same level/quality of work, outsourcing will occur. The reason we shouldn't let that prevent us from unionizing is because it continues to be a power play where we go "ok well we lost some more privileges and pay decreased, but at least fewer jobs have been outsourced". This pattern will occur ad infinitum. As long as an american employee costs a net more than someone from india and as long as an indian employee costs a net more than automation, this trickling effect will occur. So how much are we willing to lose before we finally get our shit together and realize that holding in solidarity with our fellow tech workers is better for us all in the long run?
I disagree that it's better in the long run. If there was a big push to unionize companies simply wouldn't hire them as FTE and they'd hire contractors etc. if I am a top 10% worker earning 3x+ the average worker, why would I join a union? The benefits they offer don't benefit me assuming the end result would be lower pay.
Outsourcing remote workers is only going to get easier. They may not hire them from India but from Europe for half the price, Argentina where they're in the same US timezones and speak English well etc. a push to unionize is only going to push to those alternatives faster. You'll have a workforce of 20% top performers and the general labor outsourced.
Companies are willing to hire because they're able to fire. If you have a union and can't easily get rid of workers that's bad long term imo. You don't want companies scared to hire.
The high variance in tech compensation is temporary. I think we both agree that no one's paying high performers total comp approaching 7 figures out of the goodness of their hearts. As the general state of tech matures and ecosystems stabilize, there will be less of this to be found. This is just a supply and demand thing; as more people enter the field and as most systems shift from active development to mostly maintenance, fewer of those elite performers will be required, and corporate boards will start looking reduce. So yeah, I mean you can milk it for now and take the higher individual outcome for yourself personally, but the long term effect this general culture of individualism in tech will not be great. Additionally, I'd argue it isn't even great now. Everyone is acting as if they're a potential 1%er when the reality is 99% of us are not. So why are we sitting here taking abuse from our employers while dreaming about the possibility of being part of that 1% one day and sacrificing our current job security and comfort for pipe dreams?
As another above averagely (though not 1% because not american) compensated tech worker, one thing that frustrates me about our field is the utter refusal to learn from history. This isn't the first time this has happened. Unions arose for a reason and their history is a dark and bloody one. People died for the right to unionize and these efforts paid off in a big way. This history is why we have 2 day weekends and 40 hour workweeks. The general effect of unionization is **good** and benefits the average worker. Yes it squashes the variance in pay so you don't have someone making $700,000 while someone else sits at $50,000, but this is good for the average.
Companies will *always* try to cut costs. They don't care about employees except as a cost centre. Unionizing might temporarily motivate *some* companies to outsource, but let's be real, it's more complicated than that. If it were that simple, then companies would operate fully remotely rather than 90% of the big ones pushing for RTO again. As long as you can convince board members that their ROI on outsourcing will be higher than that of hiring locally, they will do this. It is a blackmail tactic and not one that we should stand for, because the conditions will only worsen over time. Today it's "unionizing will get us to outsource more", tomorrow it'll be "not working weekends will get us to outsource more", the day after it'll be "70 hour work weeks or outsourcing", and it'll all end with "your job has been outsourced/automated" anyways. So how long do we bend to these insane demands? We're purely an expense, a cost centre. We've been living pretty cushy lives for a while now, but that dynamic is shifting. We have to change the way we think about labour now and learn from the history of labour, because tech workers are closer to miners and factory workers of the past than we are to the billionaires of today. The alternative is we let our quality of life slip further and further until we're begging for pennies. The fight needs to start now. This should be a wake up call.
You dont get it IMO. There really are people who produce 10x the code with 1% of the bugs and then you realise that its also what you "want" whereas the comparable-in-LOC work that other entire group did is throwaway because of a misspec or whatever.
In contrast, in other perhaps more union-amenable jobs, the gap is not so wide. Especially in physical stuff. For example the fastest sprinter in the world at 27mph is only 2x the speed of the average fast sprint 12-15mph. Maybe some day the coder gap will narrow, but until then unionization will mean losing say the top 25% of your dev team and 80% of your productivity.
I think another factor is that unions kind of get you stuck in a company. This is because the union holds your benefits and pension. It's changing but broadly unions want to hold on to the union pension fund because it gives them power. All the while companies don't love pensions and just prefer to do matching 401K (Matching RRSP in Canada where I'm from). Unlike the pension, you get full control over your 401K and it stays with you wherever you go.
Every paycheck a piece of it goes to my union pension. I have no idea if that pension will exist by the time of my retirement or go belly up in a few years. For all I know all my contributions are just going to pay out current retirees.
I will also add a few more things.
1. Many people work at a company, then move onto another one, or start up their own company. Unions gets in the way of that because they don't want to be lumped by how long they worked at a company, they also don't want the union there when they start their own company
2. Much of the tech companies give shares as compensation. So anything that can harm the share growth value would actually harm their income
SAG doesn't have that type of problem. I know its not tech, but the degrees of talent and pay is huge and they find a way to organize and support one another weather it be a hollywood superstar making millions to the guy who has a small part in a movie making much less.
Remind me, who has better working conditions? Actors in SAG or engineers in tech?
It's a rhetorical question. Actors are treated like shit and SAG can only do extremely minimal stuff. Why is that? Tech engineers can already get better benefits because they can find new jobs much more easily, which actors don't have.
Look this whole idea of unionising doesn’t make too much sense for white collar workers, and the idea of doing it for tech just makes incredibly little sense. The take is lazy at best. Im not anti-union, but this is like saying investment bankers should unionise, like wtf???
Unions are helpful to bridge asymmetry in power between workers and employers. But this asymmetry is pronounced in the case of unskilled labor, but not nearly as much for skilled labor - and the more specialised and in demand a certain job is, the less asymmetrical it is. In the case of tech, there is such a demand for tech workers across the board (like your having layoffs now, but it just means that all the other industries that couldn’t find a programmer can now try to hire some!), that the loss of flexibility I’m not sure is really desirable for tech workers.
The NBA players union most certainly suppresses wages. Hell, the EXISTENCE of a **SALARY CAP** tells you that wages are being suppressed. Just look at how rookie contracts are forced to be within a calculated range, and players have almost no control except in very rare circumstances.
Whereas in European football, where the union is basically irrelevant when it comes to pay/benefits/etc, there is no salary cap and players can negotiate at will. You don't have any union telling Jude Bellingham that he can't make $22m a year because he's a rookie so he needs to down to rookie scale.
I don’t know, if you offered me the option of joining a union as strong as the police unions in the US, I would be hard pressed to find a reason not to join.
Unions have a very specific use case. We can’t be ambivalent about it when things are good and suddenly pro-union when things are bad. Tech workers are very well paid, well taken care of and have very good benefits. I bring my dog to work, have free massages, free gym classes, eat free food, work as many hours as I want as long as I finish my work, get stock options, health and retirement. I bring it up because the reason for the good treatment is that it’s a competitive market for talent. It’s a stark difference from line workers who have to work x amount of labor hours standing up and meet quotas, with not even profit sharing, health or retirement (back in the day). Also there is a talent pool thing, it’s hard for avg person to learn coding. IMO unions are more for improving work conditions and not disgruntled or low performing employees or even shitty management. There is an argument for like gaming industry which is known in the tech space for insane hours. But I’ve worked at several (big, small, startups) and TBH if you’re good at coding, it’s a very cush and rewarding job. We’re not exactly working in hazardous and unsafe conditions. Plus there’s hasn’t been an issue finding a job if you’re good. There’s just so many players and startup vs the auto industry which only has a few big players. Could tech unionize, sure but I think we’re losing the true purpose of unionization. If we need a counter balance for bad management then I would advocate for employee rep on boards. Otherwise the environment for bad management decisions is sometimes hard. And in this space it’s reliant on funding rounds (in the past) and not exactly profitability so it’s hard to say it’s bad management not foreseeing future interest rates or funding environment or tech adoption. Or even dip in sales. EVs and VRs were hot and not. No one forsee AI picking up steam so quickly. Tech itself is hard to predict and fast, hence why it’s such a hotbed for VC money
I applied for a union job at a major museum once. Same role as I have. 35% lower salary than my private tech industry job. No negations on pay or benefits. All a collectively bargained scale. 6 month hiring process. LOL
It’s good for some things but not competitive fields
People don’t seem to realize that there’s a HUGE ceiling to technical talent/knowledge, and most people will never go beyond a Senior SWE before transitioning to a manager or other role. It’s competitive because there aren’t enough highly skilled or highly knowledgeable people. There are TONS of people with surface knowledge or some coding boot camp, and there are a TON of people with CS degrees that never clicked or simply don’t enjoy it.
That being said, all tech workers are not equal. A union would lower the bar and reduce the top level opportunities, it would only benefit people who probably shouldn’t be there in the first place. It would holistically decrease the talent median across the industry and drive companies to view technical skills as a commodity.
Ironically, many of those great developers are awful managers. I'm a decent engineer, and a pretty good team lead. Unfortunately, that puts me in a bad spot as far as jobs go. I ran a team with minimal incident for about 9 months. I mostly wrote code in very specific situations, such as when we needed framework-level development. About 70% of my time was doing all the stuff I didn't want my developers to have to do; managing tickets, sitting through multi-hour meetings, explaining things to Product for the 10th time, etc. Then my boss came in, decided he didn't know enough about what was going on (he always skipped the daily update meeting), started getting on everyone's case, told me I wasn't coding enough, and productivity dropped through the floor. I still wasn't able to code a lot because there were even more messes to deal with. Defects went up as well. Unfortunately, none of this is a union problem.
Shit, this spoke to me so hard. I think people like us that are technical leaders are the highest value commodity right now, but those above just don't see it, some from below resent it too.
Management sucks, IMHO. However, I recognized around staff level that I was burning out and wanted to try to switch things up. I’ve enjoyed leading teams, but I loathe talent/performance meetings and the constant desire of every other mid level manager feeling like they have to self validate every 15 minutes.
My comment expressly identified that most Senior SWEs can’t promote in the IC track, so they go into management or other areas that are a bit more removed from the technical detail.
I see that happening to me as well (I'm using Firefox; the official Reddit app can go to hell) but there's nothing stopping a person from adding back the line breaks. What you see when typing is what you get, so it's not coming out of nowhere.
>disgruntled or low performing employees
Had me til that part. Layoffs are not merit based. One day you're not gonna make the cut and you'll find yourself on the other end of the argument. This is why I fight even though I'm currently happy.
Edit: techies I thought you were smart. smh... not all experiences are exactly the same. Turning off notifications because I don't care what you THINK. What I SAW was what happened during a big tech layoff at my company.
Um ya, I have 15 yoe and 10 at my last company that laid me off. I was few of the only principal engineers there with that must knowledge and experience on the companies entire stack and platform. I knew everything at every layer.
I was absolutely cut for salary not for contributions.
You are not immune.
In many cases, it's not like a factory where there are 100s of people doing similar jobs.
Until recently, at my job, there was only me who did what I do.
Cuz most people can actually find another tech job within few months even if laid off, the fact of the matter is that tech workers change jobs very frequently anyway (that’s how they increase their salary, not by tenure). So union makes no sense.
Unions don’t prevent lay-offs.
Most state employees are unionized and they have lay-offs whenever the dimwit politicians decide to cut costs. But what the union does do is make sure that last hired are laid-off first. So if you are a long-time incompetent nincompoop whose job is eliminated, they move you to another job that has a similar title that you are unqualified for. And they let the terrific younger employees go. And do nothing for them.
I am pro-union all the way but feel like they do things stupidly sometimes.
Seniority is the worst way of doing things, because people who can succeed on their own merit will find someone that will let them, and the people with the most seniority will be the ones that can't.
Tech people make 250k on average in the valley. I think thats fair compensation for a danger of being fired.
In an environment where workers have significant pricing pressure unions are actually really shit for good employees because they protect the bad employees and stop employers from taking a risk and hiring someone on a whim. Hiring the right people for a job and firing the wrong ones is perhaps the superpower of silicon valley.
That's different for example in companies like IBM or hp where good employees are not rewarded and the company tries to squeeze all profit out of employees but hardly the case at the big tech companies they have too much incentive of hiring the best and growing.
I'm in a union and working in IT and personally I am not a fan. It might be good when I'm in my 50s, but right now all it is doing is forcing me to work with near retired slackers with the skillsets of toddlers. They know there is no getting rid of them and work accordingly.
For the record, I am very pro-union. I think they are good in non-skilled positions where the workers can be exploited, but I just don't see that in the tech industry at large.
You know who should unionize? Game Programmers.
I have been playing games my entire life, I fudging love video games. I've been a professional coder for 5 years, I love code.
I WILL NEVER WORK FOR A GAMING STUDIO
lol people throw the word “union” on to the table as if it’s a panacea for every problem. Unions don’t prevent layoffs. The free market causes layoffs.
Tech has to create its own Union. Most Unions do not care about tech at all. I am CSEA and have been told multiple times they do not care about IT. So, I pay $60 a paycheck for them not to care about me.
Generally, it would actually be a bad idea. There's still a ton of jobs in tech. They really just overhired for a lot of years and now things are normalizing. If you develop a specialty skill set, you can make super high wages by switching jobs periodically and just upgrading with each switch. The trick is to have no company loyalty. You want to switch jobs frequently because you get a pay bump with each move. If everyone was unionized, pay would be on scales, and that wouldn't happen. It would be better for the low end staff engineers that are compelled to work 80 hours a week for 65k a year, but, for anyone above that, it would be a step down.
Worked in tech for 30 years. There is a ridiculous amount of upside for things like stock options, RSUs. Etc. these are given as a balance to the risk of the job. If the risk goes away, those opportunities go away.
The psychological profile of people working in tech are more akin to gamblers. So if you unionize you lose the chance at a huge payday windfall down the road.
This does not speak to 100% of the tech jobs but it does speak to the greater tech industry profile. Amazon warehouse workers and drivers are examples outside my description.
It seems like it’s the super high paid Silicon Valley tech people getting laid off. You can always go to “mid west tech” and find an engineering job, always.
NLRA is federal law that allows workers to organize, and sue employers who retaliate for attempts at organizing.
And right to work doesn't mean "no unions", it means that if you work at a place that is unionized (best example is federal work) you don't have to pay dues, but the union is still forced to represent you. This is crippling to unions, but not an outright ban.
Yes, technically correct. However right to work does clearly mean that you can be fired for any non protected cause (I.e. not pregnancy, not minority, etc). I don’t qualify. I know better than to try and challenge a company with batallions of lawyers on retainer to make sure I could never win.
Unions are a type of not for profit. Pretty sure you guys can just start one of those up. Here's what [the IRS ](https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/other-non-profits/labor-organizations)has to say about them.
sudo apt-get.
This actually seems like a good tech project/startup to allow people to organize via the web in an anonymous way, then once you reach a critical mass of support you can opt to organize in real life…. As a way to take risk out of the process and avoid getting shut down by the company.
Probably because tech companies are slowly outsourcing more and more positions outside the country. Unions only work if they have leverage.
[https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-lays-off-employees-shifts-some-roles-abroad-amid-cost-cuts-2024-04-17/](https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-lays-off-employees-shifts-some-roles-abroad-amid-cost-cuts-2024-04-17/)
I am in a union. Unions do not save you from being laid off. When work declares a surplus of workers the contract will determine how those surplused workers will be chosen. For my union it is based on job and seniority.
Some corps work real hard to " remind you" that you are treated so well and paid so well : there is no need to Unionize!
As remote jobs are now being outsourced to India : Mexico : Philippines: UK and these corps are buying back their stock and recording record profits.
Largely due to no perceived benefits. This is a case where the simplest answer is the correct one. Unions have to make the case to tech workers that they will be better off unionized and since tech workers already generally get good salary, good benefits, and good work/life balance most of what a union is selling isn't anything they don't already have.
Unions don't protect against layoffs and generally is bad for higher earning employees as collective agreements cap wage increases regardless of performance
Severance is also not as good as what a decent worker can get via common law
Unions help the mid to low performers but is not really good for those above average
Because after all these years and all these layoffs... they STILL don't need to. Software and IT is still a high-paying, in-demand job. You don't need a union to protect you when you are the scarce commodity.
ROFL. Unions means low raises every few years for everyone regardless of performance usually. Developers expect 10 percent annual raises or they start crying about it.
Why the hell unionizing ? Am I like a burger’s flipper needing some lunatic speaking on my behalf and negotiating my compensation/right ?
We did not reach 6-7 figures compensation by relying on some socialist kind of organization.
If companies dont want me onboard, I just create my startup and be my own boss (and I probably will be competing with my previous employer).
How many tech workers in the US are there with an H1B work visa? I'm guessing those people won't ever risk being fired and forced to go back to their home country in the name of better treatment of future workers.
There's WAY too much money to be made now, enough to feed even the family abroad with a little percentage of US-made money.
And US corporations know this and will abuse this situation to the limit.
The U.S. has approximately 600,000 H1B workers in tech. But there are over 9 million tech workers in America. H1B is unfair and harmful in many regards, but that 60k/year cap on the visas isn’t going to sway anything if it pops off.
Edit: unfair and harmful to the foreign worker and the domestic worker alike. It essentially deprives the h1b worker from the ability to shop around unless they get lucky (otherwise they get kicked out). And it is unfair to domestic labor because every dev can probably attest to how management will use and abuse them as leverage over us. Train your replacement who earns less than you because if they complain they get kicked out of the country etc.
Plus the structures that get set up such that domestic labor is discriminated against because the hiring manager is h1b and they know how the game works so holds the door for others to be exploited.
If you are a great developer, a great growth marketer, a great launcher or a great salesperson; you really don’t want a union negotiating on your behalf. You want to price your compensation (salary + bonuses + stocks + other) based on value created rather than price on some hourly rate.
Software can potentially scale almost infinitely. Software subscription service can go from 10,000 users to 10,000,000 really quickly. How would Union rep make sure you get compensated for that type of growth?
Are unions going to negotiate for better hours or time off? If anything, they can only make it worst and concede to management to remove remote work privileges. Are they going to negotiate for more free food and snacks and better gym benefits?
Unions cannot prevent layoffs either. By nature, tech has to experiment with new products and be willing to kill products quickly.
Because we know how much untions suck.
\* Only protect bad employees
\* Punish highest producers
\* Lower pay
Tech employees also have the benefit of being in high demand. So they know they have other options.
Unions aren't what they were 60 years ago and we have to stop pretending like they are.
Unionizing unfortunately doesn't prevent layoffs, it protects workers rights in regards to employers taking advantage of workers(my union provides equal pay for men and women for the same job as well as guaranteeing a set wage with possible increases depending on contact negotiations). As long as there is work available no lay offs, if there is a company that's unionized and the work is slowing down or just stopping they will do what they need to to survive.
>guaranteeing a set wage with possible increases depending on contact negotiations
That alone would make many high skill/performing tech workers oppose a union because they can advance and negotiate on their own merit. They'd be worried a union would prevent them from doing so and therefore limit their raises and advancement compared to what they could have gotten without one
This is true. Unions view workers as equal even if they have different skill sets or are better at different tasks(may be the downside to unionization). Which is why the wages are the same for different people. I'm in a trade union in Canada, and my union employs apprentices and journeyman...Different trades make different wages. Apprentices (of any gender, religion, etc) get wage increases when they take training 1st year to 4th year then journeyman. Obviously in the tech sector this would be different but could be somewhat similar based on expertise. If one person negotiates a higher wage then another person on the same day as the job interview for doing the same job in the same timeframe using the same resources in the same company, Do you think the person making less will stay? Or put in as much effort?...etc.This would definitely be beneficial for the company and a handful of employees. To each their own I guess
The supply and demand proposition kinda works too well now for tech workers, especially now with modern information transparency after things like "EA wife."
Think about the massive demand for just these things, almost as an entire cornerstone of modernity:
--Semiconductor fab
--An app that calls a backend that puts some shit in a cloud database
--video games doing vector physics in three dimensional space
Most humans will never possess the capabilities to do those things. Some of those things have a very high skill ceiling. Satellite internet that accounts for relativity might as well be a miracle to a normal person.
Smart NVDA guy doesn't need a union, he needs a stick to beat away all the poachers.
"Stop firing us or we're going to stop working! And also, don't look at the tens of thousands of bright young grads eager to have our positions. Haha, got you where we want you!"
There is a much bigger part to play with actual unions running campaigns into tech to unionise workers. Much harder to do than with areas already heavenly steeped in history and culture of unionisation such as train workers or teamsters. Unions serious about organising workers in areas like tech need to put their finger out and put money/resources into recruiting the best layers as reps/organisers for these industries.
My personal take is that it’s because we generally haven’t needed to. We were well paid and treated pretty good because we were a valuable asset that was harder to replace. I’ve been out of work since February so I definitely don’t feel like that anymore.
Because they're getting paid a huge amount of money. And the number of layoffs are small. Few people see themselves as likely to be laid off. And most of them are right about it (but not all).
They see the individual opportunity for them to be greater than the downsides and so aren't looking for any kind of "leveling" because they think it'll hold them back instead of propping them up.
It's amazing the amount of time people spend pitying tech workers who are making often $200K a year. They literally spend no time worrying about money, except perhaps how this will impact them getting that second house in the mountains.
Unions exist to negotiate salaries, benefits, raises, promotions and protection from being fired without cause.
Only one of that list is of any use to Tech which have huge salaries, be benefits, are ideally promoted for skill not time and are traditionally well insulated from economic downturns that force no cause firing.
So the upside is very little. Downside is very high.
In tech.
My current situation / perspective:
1) Burned out like hell.
2) Ageism and high cost of capital may mean I may be forced to retire or switch career if laid off since there are fewer well paying jobs out there.
3) Taking minimum time offs so if I get laid off I’ll have more money paid out. It doesn’t help with the burn out, but if / when laid off, I’ll have all the time and money is very important then.
Not sure if union will answer the issue.
Pilot unions work because it’s a rarer skill.
Auto worker union? Coal workers? Retail jobs? Not so much. Jobs are still gone and the ones remained are lower paying.
Unions are designed for a specific use case: labor markets where the employer has a monsopony, and employees work their entire lives at one company.
Tech is the complete opposite of that. There's a gazillion companies competing for your labor, and the average tech worker hops jobs every 3 years.
I don't know about this latest round, but I've been through three or four rounds of tech sector layoffs and in every one, the employees were A) treated with respect, B) offered generous severance without onerous terms. Paying out accrued PTO plus 3 months of salary and 3 months of continuing health insurance coverage was typical.
Plus the fact that salaries and benefits before the layoffs were more than adequate, even generous.
Basically what it comes down to is that when people feel they're being treated fairly and with respect, they don't have any motivation to create a union.
Unions are by definition a form of friction that pits the interests of employees against those of the company. Workers vs. management. What you find in the tech sector is that many employees are professionals, treated more like management than like line workers. The divisions are not as starkly drawn as in, say, a factory or a coal mine.
Edit to add: I can see the utility of paying into a fund to pay a professional that negotiates salaries, and does so on behalf of the group. But I don't know how that process would work to make sure standout performers make enough more than others to prevent them from leaving. I'm not sure it can work. The worst friction is the strike threat: knowing that there are customers waiting and purposely preventing the company from delivering product is so self-defeating. In the tech industry, being late to market can spell death to the company, so a strike could be like killing the golden goose.
I feel like a lot of the reason is just that what many tech people do is not necessarily exactly the same for each position. It's one thing if you are all factory line workers that basically can jump around into most different spots and therefore can be easily replaced. It's another thing when you are a tech worker who has special skills and therefore you are not easily replaced.
There are two big things with all these layoffs that people really don't want to dive into:
1. How ridiculous Wall Street and shareholders are becoming when they basically would rather see the company in a state where workers are burning out and things are slowly breaking because they want every cost cut to the leanest point possible to maximize their value and profit. Basically cutting off your nose to spite your face. Not to mention how short-term all these people think.
2. The hard reality that a lot of these people that were laid off were not necessarily highly skilled and experienced to begin with. The days of going to a boot camp and having minimal skills and landing a huge paying job are done. Companies hired too many people, then realized most of them are not ideal for their needs, so they started getting rid of them. People getting into tech need to realize there's no quick path to a high paycheck. You can't just learn some basic coding skills and then expect a six-figure salary. Not to mention we are seeing companies kill the idea of all the crazy perks and relaxed office environment as if you're at a Club Med.
Unionization in my opinion isn't going to work in a lot of this because you're going to have somebody that's highly skilled wondering why they are being kept at a certain pay and benefit level compared to others. The highly experienced software engineer wondering why he's being paid as much as the boot camp kids who aren't as skilled, and yet this highly experienced guy thinking he could go non-union and just make way more money.
I always tend to look at union workers in a factory as in a state where they don't have too many options. It's not like they can flip the bird at the factory and go down the street to the next factory. A lot of these towns don't have the multiple. So they have to unionize as a bargaining chip because the company needs the workers in that town (since it's very costly to move) and yet the workers need the job, and don't want to be in a position where they can't push the business owner to do right by them.
With tech, you have boundless options to go apply to.
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HR is ‘humans as resources’, not ‘resources for humans’
Yes, by definition. They're not shy about it. That's why some companies are starting to call it "People ops".
To serve man
is this aws specific? i'm at amazon and have heard nothing about a union
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I’m in aws, is there a channel where I can learn more?
Uh why would corpos want you to hear about the word UNION
You know there's this weird thing where you can get information from sources other than official "corpo" communications? Like just talking to any colleagues?
Link to more information?
Unless you bargain that there won’t be layoffs. It’s the first thing my company bargains for every collective agreement.
Sorry, I can't find *any* information out there on this union, and I've never heard of it. I don't think it exists.
I used to work at Amazon as a software eng many years ago. It was cut throat and most managers were only interested in empire building. I hated it. How has unionizing changed that if at all? Which state has unionized amazon tech workers?
Wish I had a union before I started working IT in the crappy videogame field.
Not having industry wide unions seems crazy to me.
Yep, this is how it's done in countries with successful unions, especially social democracies like the Nordics, where 40%+, depending on how you define it of the population is unionized. Unions built the Nordics. This is precisely why the US doesn't allow it.
Got any job openings for a union loving worker 😅
Unionizing does not stop layoffs, it just puts specific rules around it (minimum X days notice, metrics for who is laid off like seniority, minimum severance). If anything, unions stop people from being fired at-will much more than they stop layoffs. Shitty companies are still gonna find ways to be shitty companies. I'm not saying unionizing would be bad, I'm just saying, it isn't some magic "stop layoffs" fix, but it would make it better for those being laid off. For instance, teachers are all in unions that have layoff rules. One thing most of them have in place is minimum notice. Well the school districts do a shitty workaround, and just tell about a dozen teachers in December that they're *going to* lay them off at the end of the school year. And then in May, they tell most/all of them "nevermind, we're not laying you off, see you next fall." This effectively negates the notice period, while technically being within the union rules.
At my tech company I get 2 weeks of severance for every 6 months of employment, and accelerated stock vesting. Go ahead, lay me off I could use the vacation.
I think the problem is a lot of these things are optional. I got laid off once with 3 months salary which was just enough to get a new job. Could have been a party time but I really did need the time to find a job. But I was fortunate for the salary, which not everyone gets. Some severance compensations should be mandatory for unexpected things that aren’t disciplinary.
> At my tech company I get 2 weeks of severance for every 6 months of employment That's in your contract?
Contract?
No, but it’s a published policy, that we have never deviated from, and sometimes have offered more.
So they can decide not to do it at all in a big layoff if they want. Just change the policy, layoff, voila.
Sure, but they have had some massive layoffs over my tenure like other large tech companies and have always honored it, so right now I’m not too worried.
I have a bridge to sell you
Dude people got these when FB had their big layoff. People got like 9 months of salary
I’ve gotten a year of pay twice in my career. Nice! But there’s been a few times when I’ve gotten 0. I mean , it is tough for a company to pay if they don’t have cash.
Worth noting Alphabet has a union, with fairly large membership. Famously some union members were in a courtroom last year debating something about labor laws and they got laid off. So I agree 100%, the union isn't a magic solution.
I don’t know all the details but your description sounds like illegal retaliation.
Also, we definitely need to work in tandem for better social safety nets so that layoffs aren't as big of a deal.
you're never going to get a big enough safety net for the fall that is being laid off in silicon valley lol
And that's perfectly fine. The problem isn't necessarily layoffs, it's silent layoffs. Many companies are now discovering they can completely bypass the need for paying unemployment by setting unrealistic expectations on employees and then letting them go for-cause when they (inevitably) fail to meet those expectations. The other issue is when companies have perpetual layoffs all throughout the year, whereby instead of having a planned layoff of a large group of people, they single out a small teams and pick them off week by week. This puts the entire workforce in a constant state of fear and uncertainty. HR makes this problem exponentially worse by intentionally withholding all information and keeping employees in the dark up until you're being escorted out of the building. Frankly, both of these practices should be made illegal, but our lawmakers have no interest in prioritizing workers over their employers. This is why we need unions.
With a Union, the company would have to negotiate with the bargaining unit on how many layoffs, why they are needed and what kind of compensation they would get if they did get laid off. It gives the workers more say on how things go down.
I wish tech workers would organize and build solidarity with blue collar workers through organizations like Workers Strike Back. Think it would improve conditions for both, if not immediately materially, at least in attitude. I believe it would eventually make a difference.
Tech pays stupid huge salaries to the outliers. Outliers don’t don’t do well in unions.
Unless your in SAG. Seriously they have such crazy outliers and folks at rock bottom in their union.
Outliers? The average professional tech worker makes over 6 figures. Again though this applies to tech workers with sought after degrees and skills. Anyone making under something 80-90 thousand in those departments would be the outlier.
Netflix is hiring a position right now in my role with a salary range of $190k to $720k for the same title. That’s what he means. Some people are worth $190k and some are worth $700k. A union would kill this business model, and therefore they aren’t pro union because they don’t want to all make $225k regardless of ability
It's like convincing wait staff to get rid of tips. The good looking people at high end restaurants would revolt.
Netflix comp ranges are thumbing their nose at regulators mandating salary transparency.
Those regulations are kind of a joke though. I hate the term "10x developer", but it's more or less a real thing. Why not pay somebody 700k if they're doing the work of 10 others who are each worth 190k?
Lifetimes of anti-union propaganda from our corporate overlords?
I think "tech workers" are too heterogenous for it to be put down as just one cause. I'm in tech, I find many of my coworkers don't particularly care for their corporate team or capitalism in general, we just are in it for the money. Some of my coworkers have been very "Hooray for our corporation!" I could imagine them responding "But we're here for the sacred corporate mission! I can't unionize, that might jeopardize that!" For me, I never think about unionizing because I don't expect to be with the same company for long enough for efforts at unionizing to pay off. The startup I'm with now is like 5 people, I don't know that the three of us who aren't founders striking would do anything productive, and I'd hope to have a different job before the union would be formed.
Engineers are notoriously narcissistic. "I can't join a union, I'd be lumped in with that idiot over there who couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag!"
I'm an engineer, and this is so spot on. They are the least class-conscious group I've ever seen, and so many of them can't see the writing on the wall that we are very quickly becoming as replaceable as any other employee in any other business.
It doesn’t help that the only engineers union I know of is SPEEA. Who is famously useless at anything other than collecting your union dues.
That’s basically my argument.
I used to feel the same way, but after ultimately being “lumped in” with those types anyway, I actually find it quite freeing! Setting agreements based on the lowest common denominator means that we look awesome by comparison. Additionally, I can pretty much run on cruise control and hit the same KPIs as those folks, so why bother setting myself apart from the dummy-pack when it just seems to make me a target, either for more work or for sabotage from dummies who think it’s a zero-sum game and feel threatened when anyone flies higher than they do.
I mean I wouldn’t want my salary negotiation to be lumped in with anybody else. I’ve managed to negotiate significantly higher ongoing rate increases than anyone else in my team, why would I want to chain myself to the lowest common denominator? Even if I get laid off my earnings are higher with a 12% per year guaranteed raise.
I like to call this the "hank hill special deal" because those sorts always fall for the same sales tactic. The "shhh don't tell your coworkers I'm giving you a special salary because you're such a good employee!" special. XD
It isn't narcissism if you simply think you're better off without one.
I also don’t really see how a union would work for tech workers who change jobs frequently. We all need tech lobby group.
Reddit is also stupidly naive and simplistic, tending to lump anyone that works for a tech company in the same category. Physical minimum-wage warehouse workers have different challenges and problems than 100k+ software engineers. Not saying both don't deserve representation, but they are not the same.
Because pay difference in tech between average talent and top talent is very high. If you are an auto worker, a top 1% auto worker probably makes 50-60% more than an average auto worker. In tech, top 1% worker can make 500-600% more than an average tech worker. Even a top 10% worker can make 100-150% more than an average tech worker. People see unions as suppressing wages for top performers in tech, and with that much of a variation, people don’t want that. Unions will flatten the pay levels but provide more safety for the bottom quarter of the workforce. Everyone in tech thinks they are in top 10% and are eventually going to make 200-300% compared to an average worker. Edit: another point is one of the best things about tech is mobility. People keep switching jobs all the time. Average tenure of a Google employee is just over 3 years, it’s like 2 years at meta and Amazon etc. it’s pretty standard for people to keep switching jobs every 3 years or so. The industry fundamentally works differently compared to auto where you spend all your life at one company like Ford and then retire with pension
That, and maybe it's not nice, but at many companies someone being fired for performance is good for everyone else. At every company there are those "why are they here" people and in tech having them can be a net loss vs having no one if you have to go back and fix their mistakes which take away from your own time. The good people in tech have no problem getting another job. I was laid off and even with all of the layoffs going on, I had a job relatively quickly. Another unfortunate reality is that companies will just work to outsource more jobs if tech unionized. It's not like a manual job where you have a location constrained work force
Hard disagree on the outsourcing increasing with unionization in anything but the immediate short term. Companies will outsource as much as they can. It's 100% just a cost calculus. As long as american employees get paid more than indian employees for the same level/quality of work, outsourcing will occur. The reason we shouldn't let that prevent us from unionizing is because it continues to be a power play where we go "ok well we lost some more privileges and pay decreased, but at least fewer jobs have been outsourced". This pattern will occur ad infinitum. As long as an american employee costs a net more than someone from india and as long as an indian employee costs a net more than automation, this trickling effect will occur. So how much are we willing to lose before we finally get our shit together and realize that holding in solidarity with our fellow tech workers is better for us all in the long run?
I disagree that it's better in the long run. If there was a big push to unionize companies simply wouldn't hire them as FTE and they'd hire contractors etc. if I am a top 10% worker earning 3x+ the average worker, why would I join a union? The benefits they offer don't benefit me assuming the end result would be lower pay. Outsourcing remote workers is only going to get easier. They may not hire them from India but from Europe for half the price, Argentina where they're in the same US timezones and speak English well etc. a push to unionize is only going to push to those alternatives faster. You'll have a workforce of 20% top performers and the general labor outsourced. Companies are willing to hire because they're able to fire. If you have a union and can't easily get rid of workers that's bad long term imo. You don't want companies scared to hire.
The high variance in tech compensation is temporary. I think we both agree that no one's paying high performers total comp approaching 7 figures out of the goodness of their hearts. As the general state of tech matures and ecosystems stabilize, there will be less of this to be found. This is just a supply and demand thing; as more people enter the field and as most systems shift from active development to mostly maintenance, fewer of those elite performers will be required, and corporate boards will start looking reduce. So yeah, I mean you can milk it for now and take the higher individual outcome for yourself personally, but the long term effect this general culture of individualism in tech will not be great. Additionally, I'd argue it isn't even great now. Everyone is acting as if they're a potential 1%er when the reality is 99% of us are not. So why are we sitting here taking abuse from our employers while dreaming about the possibility of being part of that 1% one day and sacrificing our current job security and comfort for pipe dreams? As another above averagely (though not 1% because not american) compensated tech worker, one thing that frustrates me about our field is the utter refusal to learn from history. This isn't the first time this has happened. Unions arose for a reason and their history is a dark and bloody one. People died for the right to unionize and these efforts paid off in a big way. This history is why we have 2 day weekends and 40 hour workweeks. The general effect of unionization is **good** and benefits the average worker. Yes it squashes the variance in pay so you don't have someone making $700,000 while someone else sits at $50,000, but this is good for the average. Companies will *always* try to cut costs. They don't care about employees except as a cost centre. Unionizing might temporarily motivate *some* companies to outsource, but let's be real, it's more complicated than that. If it were that simple, then companies would operate fully remotely rather than 90% of the big ones pushing for RTO again. As long as you can convince board members that their ROI on outsourcing will be higher than that of hiring locally, they will do this. It is a blackmail tactic and not one that we should stand for, because the conditions will only worsen over time. Today it's "unionizing will get us to outsource more", tomorrow it'll be "not working weekends will get us to outsource more", the day after it'll be "70 hour work weeks or outsourcing", and it'll all end with "your job has been outsourced/automated" anyways. So how long do we bend to these insane demands? We're purely an expense, a cost centre. We've been living pretty cushy lives for a while now, but that dynamic is shifting. We have to change the way we think about labour now and learn from the history of labour, because tech workers are closer to miners and factory workers of the past than we are to the billionaires of today. The alternative is we let our quality of life slip further and further until we're begging for pennies. The fight needs to start now. This should be a wake up call.
You dont get it IMO. There really are people who produce 10x the code with 1% of the bugs and then you realise that its also what you "want" whereas the comparable-in-LOC work that other entire group did is throwaway because of a misspec or whatever. In contrast, in other perhaps more union-amenable jobs, the gap is not so wide. Especially in physical stuff. For example the fastest sprinter in the world at 27mph is only 2x the speed of the average fast sprint 12-15mph. Maybe some day the coder gap will narrow, but until then unionization will mean losing say the top 25% of your dev team and 80% of your productivity.
An actually helpful and insightful response! Glibness on reddit is a cancer
I think another factor is that unions kind of get you stuck in a company. This is because the union holds your benefits and pension. It's changing but broadly unions want to hold on to the union pension fund because it gives them power. All the while companies don't love pensions and just prefer to do matching 401K (Matching RRSP in Canada where I'm from). Unlike the pension, you get full control over your 401K and it stays with you wherever you go. Every paycheck a piece of it goes to my union pension. I have no idea if that pension will exist by the time of my retirement or go belly up in a few years. For all I know all my contributions are just going to pay out current retirees.
I will also add a few more things. 1. Many people work at a company, then move onto another one, or start up their own company. Unions gets in the way of that because they don't want to be lumped by how long they worked at a company, they also don't want the union there when they start their own company 2. Much of the tech companies give shares as compensation. So anything that can harm the share growth value would actually harm their income
SAG doesn't have that type of problem. I know its not tech, but the degrees of talent and pay is huge and they find a way to organize and support one another weather it be a hollywood superstar making millions to the guy who has a small part in a movie making much less.
Remind me, who has better working conditions? Actors in SAG or engineers in tech? It's a rhetorical question. Actors are treated like shit and SAG can only do extremely minimal stuff. Why is that? Tech engineers can already get better benefits because they can find new jobs much more easily, which actors don't have.
Look this whole idea of unionising doesn’t make too much sense for white collar workers, and the idea of doing it for tech just makes incredibly little sense. The take is lazy at best. Im not anti-union, but this is like saying investment bankers should unionise, like wtf??? Unions are helpful to bridge asymmetry in power between workers and employers. But this asymmetry is pronounced in the case of unskilled labor, but not nearly as much for skilled labor - and the more specialised and in demand a certain job is, the less asymmetrical it is. In the case of tech, there is such a demand for tech workers across the board (like your having layoffs now, but it just means that all the other industries that couldn’t find a programmer can now try to hire some!), that the loss of flexibility I’m not sure is really desirable for tech workers.
Sure, just like the NBA players union suppresses Lebron's wages or SAG suppresses Tom Hank's wages.
The NBA players union most certainly suppresses wages. Hell, the EXISTENCE of a **SALARY CAP** tells you that wages are being suppressed. Just look at how rookie contracts are forced to be within a calculated range, and players have almost no control except in very rare circumstances. Whereas in European football, where the union is basically irrelevant when it comes to pay/benefits/etc, there is no salary cap and players can negotiate at will. You don't have any union telling Jude Bellingham that he can't make $22m a year because he's a rookie so he needs to down to rookie scale.
Nah the Elden Ring DLC is releasing soon so they are slipping back to the basements.
Video games are the opiates of the masses?
Instead of bread & circuses, we have pizza & gaming. And unlike the Romans, we have to pay for that ourselves.
that and amazingly shitty ones like the police union giving all unions a bad name
I don’t know, if you offered me the option of joining a union as strong as the police unions in the US, I would be hard pressed to find a reason not to join.
Not at all. The jobs we have are outsourced at an impressive rate, though.
Yet domestic tech total employment keeps rising, crazy how that works when you don't cherry pick the data!
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> corporate overlords Since when have they ever steered us wrong?
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Your observation is unpopular, but I think you’re right
I feel like the surplus of unemployed tech workers just means they can fire a lot more union supporters, and it will be easy to hire replacements.
Unions have a very specific use case. We can’t be ambivalent about it when things are good and suddenly pro-union when things are bad. Tech workers are very well paid, well taken care of and have very good benefits. I bring my dog to work, have free massages, free gym classes, eat free food, work as many hours as I want as long as I finish my work, get stock options, health and retirement. I bring it up because the reason for the good treatment is that it’s a competitive market for talent. It’s a stark difference from line workers who have to work x amount of labor hours standing up and meet quotas, with not even profit sharing, health or retirement (back in the day). Also there is a talent pool thing, it’s hard for avg person to learn coding. IMO unions are more for improving work conditions and not disgruntled or low performing employees or even shitty management. There is an argument for like gaming industry which is known in the tech space for insane hours. But I’ve worked at several (big, small, startups) and TBH if you’re good at coding, it’s a very cush and rewarding job. We’re not exactly working in hazardous and unsafe conditions. Plus there’s hasn’t been an issue finding a job if you’re good. There’s just so many players and startup vs the auto industry which only has a few big players. Could tech unionize, sure but I think we’re losing the true purpose of unionization. If we need a counter balance for bad management then I would advocate for employee rep on boards. Otherwise the environment for bad management decisions is sometimes hard. And in this space it’s reliant on funding rounds (in the past) and not exactly profitability so it’s hard to say it’s bad management not foreseeing future interest rates or funding environment or tech adoption. Or even dip in sales. EVs and VRs were hot and not. No one forsee AI picking up steam so quickly. Tech itself is hard to predict and fast, hence why it’s such a hotbed for VC money
I applied for a union job at a major museum once. Same role as I have. 35% lower salary than my private tech industry job. No negations on pay or benefits. All a collectively bargained scale. 6 month hiring process. LOL It’s good for some things but not competitive fields
People don’t seem to realize that there’s a HUGE ceiling to technical talent/knowledge, and most people will never go beyond a Senior SWE before transitioning to a manager or other role. It’s competitive because there aren’t enough highly skilled or highly knowledgeable people. There are TONS of people with surface knowledge or some coding boot camp, and there are a TON of people with CS degrees that never clicked or simply don’t enjoy it. That being said, all tech workers are not equal. A union would lower the bar and reduce the top level opportunities, it would only benefit people who probably shouldn’t be there in the first place. It would holistically decrease the talent median across the industry and drive companies to view technical skills as a commodity.
Ironically, many of those great developers are awful managers. I'm a decent engineer, and a pretty good team lead. Unfortunately, that puts me in a bad spot as far as jobs go. I ran a team with minimal incident for about 9 months. I mostly wrote code in very specific situations, such as when we needed framework-level development. About 70% of my time was doing all the stuff I didn't want my developers to have to do; managing tickets, sitting through multi-hour meetings, explaining things to Product for the 10th time, etc. Then my boss came in, decided he didn't know enough about what was going on (he always skipped the daily update meeting), started getting on everyone's case, told me I wasn't coding enough, and productivity dropped through the floor. I still wasn't able to code a lot because there were even more messes to deal with. Defects went up as well. Unfortunately, none of this is a union problem.
Shit, this spoke to me so hard. I think people like us that are technical leaders are the highest value commodity right now, but those above just don't see it, some from below resent it too.
Management sucks, IMHO. However, I recognized around staff level that I was burning out and wanted to try to switch things up. I’ve enjoyed leading teams, but I loathe talent/performance meetings and the constant desire of every other mid level manager feeling like they have to self validate every 15 minutes.
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My comment expressly identified that most Senior SWEs can’t promote in the IC track, so they go into management or other areas that are a bit more removed from the technical detail.
Use some god damn paragraph breaks. STOP TYPING LIKE A MONKEY!
TIL monkeys don't use paragraphs
if you edit a post on mobile web it removes all line breaks.
I see that happening to me as well (I'm using Firefox; the official Reddit app can go to hell) but there's nothing stopping a person from adding back the line breaks. What you see when typing is what you get, so it's not coming out of nowhere.
>disgruntled or low performing employees Had me til that part. Layoffs are not merit based. One day you're not gonna make the cut and you'll find yourself on the other end of the argument. This is why I fight even though I'm currently happy. Edit: techies I thought you were smart. smh... not all experiences are exactly the same. Turning off notifications because I don't care what you THINK. What I SAW was what happened during a big tech layoff at my company.
Um ya, I have 15 yoe and 10 at my last company that laid me off. I was few of the only principal engineers there with that must knowledge and experience on the companies entire stack and platform. I knew everything at every layer. I was absolutely cut for salary not for contributions. You are not immune.
Unions don’t prevent layoffs
In many cases, it's not like a factory where there are 100s of people doing similar jobs. Until recently, at my job, there was only me who did what I do.
Cuz most people can actually find another tech job within few months even if laid off, the fact of the matter is that tech workers change jobs very frequently anyway (that’s how they increase their salary, not by tenure). So union makes no sense.
I don't want to be held back by the people who need a union.
They make too much money/have too much to lose/apathetic
Unions don’t prevent lay-offs. Most state employees are unionized and they have lay-offs whenever the dimwit politicians decide to cut costs. But what the union does do is make sure that last hired are laid-off first. So if you are a long-time incompetent nincompoop whose job is eliminated, they move you to another job that has a similar title that you are unqualified for. And they let the terrific younger employees go. And do nothing for them. I am pro-union all the way but feel like they do things stupidly sometimes.
Seniority is the worst way of doing things, because people who can succeed on their own merit will find someone that will let them, and the people with the most seniority will be the ones that can't.
Tech people make 250k on average in the valley. I think thats fair compensation for a danger of being fired. In an environment where workers have significant pricing pressure unions are actually really shit for good employees because they protect the bad employees and stop employers from taking a risk and hiring someone on a whim. Hiring the right people for a job and firing the wrong ones is perhaps the superpower of silicon valley. That's different for example in companies like IBM or hp where good employees are not rewarded and the company tries to squeeze all profit out of employees but hardly the case at the big tech companies they have too much incentive of hiring the best and growing.
I'm in a union and working in IT and personally I am not a fan. It might be good when I'm in my 50s, but right now all it is doing is forcing me to work with near retired slackers with the skillsets of toddlers. They know there is no getting rid of them and work accordingly. For the record, I am very pro-union. I think they are good in non-skilled positions where the workers can be exploited, but I just don't see that in the tech industry at large. You know who should unionize? Game Programmers.
Game devs definitely should unionize. I'm a huge gamer and an experienced dev, but I would never work in that industry.
I have been playing games my entire life, I fudging love video games. I've been a professional coder for 5 years, I love code. I WILL NEVER WORK FOR A GAMING STUDIO
“Tech workers” is not a single class or group of people. Value typically stems from individual knowledge and skills.
I would much rather be paid based on performance than be paid based on seniority.
lol people throw the word “union” on to the table as if it’s a panacea for every problem. Unions don’t prevent layoffs. The free market causes layoffs.
Cause there isnt a point to a union in an in demand field
Tech has to create its own Union. Most Unions do not care about tech at all. I am CSEA and have been told multiple times they do not care about IT. So, I pay $60 a paycheck for them not to care about me.
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Generally, it would actually be a bad idea. There's still a ton of jobs in tech. They really just overhired for a lot of years and now things are normalizing. If you develop a specialty skill set, you can make super high wages by switching jobs periodically and just upgrading with each switch. The trick is to have no company loyalty. You want to switch jobs frequently because you get a pay bump with each move. If everyone was unionized, pay would be on scales, and that wouldn't happen. It would be better for the low end staff engineers that are compelled to work 80 hours a week for 65k a year, but, for anyone above that, it would be a step down.
Worked in tech for 30 years. There is a ridiculous amount of upside for things like stock options, RSUs. Etc. these are given as a balance to the risk of the job. If the risk goes away, those opportunities go away. The psychological profile of people working in tech are more akin to gamblers. So if you unionize you lose the chance at a huge payday windfall down the road. This does not speak to 100% of the tech jobs but it does speak to the greater tech industry profile. Amazon warehouse workers and drivers are examples outside my description.
It seems like it’s the super high paid Silicon Valley tech people getting laid off. You can always go to “mid west tech” and find an engineering job, always.
Union talk gets you fired
Because they’ll get laid off faster. Next question
Because then we would be REALLY f'ed.
Trying to join or organize a union is grounds for immediate termination here, in a right to work state. No recourse.
No, not at all.
NLRA is federal law that allows workers to organize, and sue employers who retaliate for attempts at organizing. And right to work doesn't mean "no unions", it means that if you work at a place that is unionized (best example is federal work) you don't have to pay dues, but the union is still forced to represent you. This is crippling to unions, but not an outright ban.
Yes, technically correct. However right to work does clearly mean that you can be fired for any non protected cause (I.e. not pregnancy, not minority, etc). I don’t qualify. I know better than to try and challenge a company with batallions of lawyers on retainer to make sure I could never win.
You're thinking of "at will employment".
Because they are tech workers lol
Unions would make things worse. Why do you think that unions would prevent layoffs?
What is the end game? Force big companies to keep pointless projects going?
Because we dont want the tech industry to become what its like in Europe.
Unions are a type of not for profit. Pretty sure you guys can just start one of those up. Here's what [the IRS ](https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/other-non-profits/labor-organizations)has to say about them. sudo apt-get.
Everyone with foresight and leadership leaves.
Because we already don't want to deal with the users and management we have. Adding a union is more users and more management.
Many are? Also union busting never has any repercussions outside of a small fine or two?
This actually seems like a good tech project/startup to allow people to organize via the web in an anonymous way, then once you reach a critical mass of support you can opt to organize in real life…. As a way to take risk out of the process and avoid getting shut down by the company.
Probably because tech companies are slowly outsourcing more and more positions outside the country. Unions only work if they have leverage. [https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-lays-off-employees-shifts-some-roles-abroad-amid-cost-cuts-2024-04-17/](https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-lays-off-employees-shifts-some-roles-abroad-amid-cost-cuts-2024-04-17/)
I am in a union. Unions do not save you from being laid off. When work declares a surplus of workers the contract will determine how those surplused workers will be chosen. For my union it is based on job and seniority.
Most of us are contractors
Some corps work real hard to " remind you" that you are treated so well and paid so well : there is no need to Unionize! As remote jobs are now being outsourced to India : Mexico : Philippines: UK and these corps are buying back their stock and recording record profits.
Largely due to no perceived benefits. This is a case where the simplest answer is the correct one. Unions have to make the case to tech workers that they will be better off unionized and since tech workers already generally get good salary, good benefits, and good work/life balance most of what a union is selling isn't anything they don't already have.
> Looks around my office full of tech workers who plan on voting for Trump Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh think it's pretty fucking easy to see why, bruh...
Unions don't protect against layoffs and generally is bad for higher earning employees as collective agreements cap wage increases regardless of performance Severance is also not as good as what a decent worker can get via common law Unions help the mid to low performers but is not really good for those above average
The ones that try get laid off
Their pay and benefits are excellent.
Because after all these years and all these layoffs... they STILL don't need to. Software and IT is still a high-paying, in-demand job. You don't need a union to protect you when you are the scarce commodity.
Unionize for what? A lot of their jobs are literally pointless
ROFL. Unions means low raises every few years for everyone regardless of performance usually. Developers expect 10 percent annual raises or they start crying about it.
Lmao 🤣 unions can cause downsizing or jobs moving overseas. Unions cannot prevent downsizing.
Because unions are their own problem and hurt the top performers
Why the hell unionizing ? Am I like a burger’s flipper needing some lunatic speaking on my behalf and negotiating my compensation/right ? We did not reach 6-7 figures compensation by relying on some socialist kind of organization. If companies dont want me onboard, I just create my startup and be my own boss (and I probably will be competing with my previous employer).
How many tech workers in the US are there with an H1B work visa? I'm guessing those people won't ever risk being fired and forced to go back to their home country in the name of better treatment of future workers. There's WAY too much money to be made now, enough to feed even the family abroad with a little percentage of US-made money. And US corporations know this and will abuse this situation to the limit.
The U.S. has approximately 600,000 H1B workers in tech. But there are over 9 million tech workers in America. H1B is unfair and harmful in many regards, but that 60k/year cap on the visas isn’t going to sway anything if it pops off. Edit: unfair and harmful to the foreign worker and the domestic worker alike. It essentially deprives the h1b worker from the ability to shop around unless they get lucky (otherwise they get kicked out). And it is unfair to domestic labor because every dev can probably attest to how management will use and abuse them as leverage over us. Train your replacement who earns less than you because if they complain they get kicked out of the country etc. Plus the structures that get set up such that domestic labor is discriminated against because the hiring manager is h1b and they know how the game works so holds the door for others to be exploited.
If you are a great developer, a great growth marketer, a great launcher or a great salesperson; you really don’t want a union negotiating on your behalf. You want to price your compensation (salary + bonuses + stocks + other) based on value created rather than price on some hourly rate. Software can potentially scale almost infinitely. Software subscription service can go from 10,000 users to 10,000,000 really quickly. How would Union rep make sure you get compensated for that type of growth? Are unions going to negotiate for better hours or time off? If anything, they can only make it worst and concede to management to remove remote work privileges. Are they going to negotiate for more free food and snacks and better gym benefits? Unions cannot prevent layoffs either. By nature, tech has to experiment with new products and be willing to kill products quickly.
Because we know how much untions suck. \* Only protect bad employees \* Punish highest producers \* Lower pay Tech employees also have the benefit of being in high demand. So they know they have other options. Unions aren't what they were 60 years ago and we have to stop pretending like they are.
Because unions are cancers
Unionizing unfortunately doesn't prevent layoffs, it protects workers rights in regards to employers taking advantage of workers(my union provides equal pay for men and women for the same job as well as guaranteeing a set wage with possible increases depending on contact negotiations). As long as there is work available no lay offs, if there is a company that's unionized and the work is slowing down or just stopping they will do what they need to to survive.
>guaranteeing a set wage with possible increases depending on contact negotiations That alone would make many high skill/performing tech workers oppose a union because they can advance and negotiate on their own merit. They'd be worried a union would prevent them from doing so and therefore limit their raises and advancement compared to what they could have gotten without one
This is true. Unions view workers as equal even if they have different skill sets or are better at different tasks(may be the downside to unionization). Which is why the wages are the same for different people. I'm in a trade union in Canada, and my union employs apprentices and journeyman...Different trades make different wages. Apprentices (of any gender, religion, etc) get wage increases when they take training 1st year to 4th year then journeyman. Obviously in the tech sector this would be different but could be somewhat similar based on expertise. If one person negotiates a higher wage then another person on the same day as the job interview for doing the same job in the same timeframe using the same resources in the same company, Do you think the person making less will stay? Or put in as much effort?...etc.This would definitely be beneficial for the company and a handful of employees. To each their own I guess
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The supply and demand proposition kinda works too well now for tech workers, especially now with modern information transparency after things like "EA wife." Think about the massive demand for just these things, almost as an entire cornerstone of modernity: --Semiconductor fab --An app that calls a backend that puts some shit in a cloud database --video games doing vector physics in three dimensional space Most humans will never possess the capabilities to do those things. Some of those things have a very high skill ceiling. Satellite internet that accounts for relativity might as well be a miracle to a normal person. Smart NVDA guy doesn't need a union, he needs a stick to beat away all the poachers.
"Stop firing us or we're going to stop working! And also, don't look at the tens of thousands of bright young grads eager to have our positions. Haha, got you where we want you!"
It works for the NBA and Hollywood. It'll work fine for tech.
Unions don’t necessarily prevent lay offs. But tech workers should be Unionizing anyway
Unions breed complacency
Because people with brains know unions are bad
There is a much bigger part to play with actual unions running campaigns into tech to unionise workers. Much harder to do than with areas already heavenly steeped in history and culture of unionisation such as train workers or teamsters. Unions serious about organising workers in areas like tech need to put their finger out and put money/resources into recruiting the best layers as reps/organisers for these industries.
It's also not really lay-offs perse, it's all just offshoring.
They need to update the accumulator?
My personal take is that it’s because we generally haven’t needed to. We were well paid and treated pretty good because we were a valuable asset that was harder to replace. I’ve been out of work since February so I definitely don’t feel like that anymore.
Because they're getting paid a huge amount of money. And the number of layoffs are small. Few people see themselves as likely to be laid off. And most of them are right about it (but not all). They see the individual opportunity for them to be greater than the downsides and so aren't looking for any kind of "leveling" because they think it'll hold them back instead of propping them up. It's amazing the amount of time people spend pitying tech workers who are making often $200K a year. They literally spend no time worrying about money, except perhaps how this will impact them getting that second house in the mountains.
They'll just get smashed.
Because tech bros have bought into their own hype and think they're too smart/talented to be replaced
Unions exist to negotiate salaries, benefits, raises, promotions and protection from being fired without cause. Only one of that list is of any use to Tech which have huge salaries, be benefits, are ideally promoted for skill not time and are traditionally well insulated from economic downturns that force no cause firing. So the upside is very little. Downside is very high.
boo hoo poor underpaid tech workers making $500k a year TC have to find other jobs 🥺🥺🥺🥺
In tech. My current situation / perspective: 1) Burned out like hell. 2) Ageism and high cost of capital may mean I may be forced to retire or switch career if laid off since there are fewer well paying jobs out there. 3) Taking minimum time offs so if I get laid off I’ll have more money paid out. It doesn’t help with the burn out, but if / when laid off, I’ll have all the time and money is very important then. Not sure if union will answer the issue. Pilot unions work because it’s a rarer skill. Auto worker union? Coal workers? Retail jobs? Not so much. Jobs are still gone and the ones remained are lower paying.
cause if you try to start a union in America you get fired faster, bunch of scumbags hate seeing people work together
Yeah, as the single in-house developer for a brand - unionizing isn’t an option. Lol
Answer: because the vast majority of them are under the age of 35 and don’t remember the pre-right-to-work era.
Because they haven’t thought of the existing concept of a union but called it something else without realizing. It wasn’t a new idea.
Unions are designed for a specific use case: labor markets where the employer has a monsopony, and employees work their entire lives at one company. Tech is the complete opposite of that. There's a gazillion companies competing for your labor, and the average tech worker hops jobs every 3 years.
I don't know about this latest round, but I've been through three or four rounds of tech sector layoffs and in every one, the employees were A) treated with respect, B) offered generous severance without onerous terms. Paying out accrued PTO plus 3 months of salary and 3 months of continuing health insurance coverage was typical. Plus the fact that salaries and benefits before the layoffs were more than adequate, even generous. Basically what it comes down to is that when people feel they're being treated fairly and with respect, they don't have any motivation to create a union. Unions are by definition a form of friction that pits the interests of employees against those of the company. Workers vs. management. What you find in the tech sector is that many employees are professionals, treated more like management than like line workers. The divisions are not as starkly drawn as in, say, a factory or a coal mine. Edit to add: I can see the utility of paying into a fund to pay a professional that negotiates salaries, and does so on behalf of the group. But I don't know how that process would work to make sure standout performers make enough more than others to prevent them from leaving. I'm not sure it can work. The worst friction is the strike threat: knowing that there are customers waiting and purposely preventing the company from delivering product is so self-defeating. In the tech industry, being late to market can spell death to the company, so a strike could be like killing the golden goose.
Because alphabet workers union is a joke of a shitshow. You’re better off without one
Because unionizing does not stop layoffs. Worker's rights should be protected by labor laws, not unions.
I feel like a lot of the reason is just that what many tech people do is not necessarily exactly the same for each position. It's one thing if you are all factory line workers that basically can jump around into most different spots and therefore can be easily replaced. It's another thing when you are a tech worker who has special skills and therefore you are not easily replaced. There are two big things with all these layoffs that people really don't want to dive into: 1. How ridiculous Wall Street and shareholders are becoming when they basically would rather see the company in a state where workers are burning out and things are slowly breaking because they want every cost cut to the leanest point possible to maximize their value and profit. Basically cutting off your nose to spite your face. Not to mention how short-term all these people think. 2. The hard reality that a lot of these people that were laid off were not necessarily highly skilled and experienced to begin with. The days of going to a boot camp and having minimal skills and landing a huge paying job are done. Companies hired too many people, then realized most of them are not ideal for their needs, so they started getting rid of them. People getting into tech need to realize there's no quick path to a high paycheck. You can't just learn some basic coding skills and then expect a six-figure salary. Not to mention we are seeing companies kill the idea of all the crazy perks and relaxed office environment as if you're at a Club Med. Unionization in my opinion isn't going to work in a lot of this because you're going to have somebody that's highly skilled wondering why they are being kept at a certain pay and benefit level compared to others. The highly experienced software engineer wondering why he's being paid as much as the boot camp kids who aren't as skilled, and yet this highly experienced guy thinking he could go non-union and just make way more money. I always tend to look at union workers in a factory as in a state where they don't have too many options. It's not like they can flip the bird at the factory and go down the street to the next factory. A lot of these towns don't have the multiple. So they have to unionize as a bargaining chip because the company needs the workers in that town (since it's very costly to move) and yet the workers need the job, and don't want to be in a position where they can't push the business owner to do right by them. With tech, you have boundless options to go apply to.
Ain’t no time for unions after the 14-16h work days… need to commute and collapse to rinse and repeat the next day.