[tptacek]

Software developers have incredible leverage right now, perhaps more than any cohort of employees in the country, and while most don't have salary to organize around, there are plenty of other practices --- transparency and liquidity of equity compensation being a great example --- that generate a broad base of support across the whole industry.

People hear the term "union" and they think "shop rules" and "union contract salary". There's no reason that's what has to happen. Substitute "professional association" for "union" and you've got all the degrees of freedom you could want for us all to profit from organization without over-complicating our work lives.

[morgante]

> People hear the term "union" and they think "shop rules" and "union contract salary".

The problem is that a significant number of the people who push "unions" (especially on places like HN) are actually trying to push for those things. Just look in this thread to find people arguing over whether there actually are large differences in developer performance.

If people want a professional association (I do!) let's call it that and avoid all this union talk. Think lawyers, not factories.

[knucklesandwich]

Hi, I assume you're talking about me (the person above expressing some skepticism about the 10x programmer thing). I'm actually open to be proven wrong, but I'm not sure that makes much of a difference in terms of how compensation is justified in the real world (again, ask your employer to provide justification for salaries if you think 10x programmers exist and they are paid as such). Whether or not I'm right, I'm one person with one vote in a union.

A professional association by contrast does not work to help workers in a workplace dispute. It is fundamentally an advocacy group for the profession itself and works to advance it by creating professional standards, lobbying, offering education and certification, etc. The AMA for example, does not engage in collective bargaining with the management of a hospital and has no legal right to compel such a thing under the NLRA. The AMA does however lobby politicians and puts its people on medical boards to limit the supply of doctors. Furthermore a professional organization works at the level of a single profession and doesn't organize workplaces in strikes, which is the major power of a union.

Unions can aggregate under federations that often resemble and provide the same function as professional associations, but a professional association provides almost none of the benefits of a union.

[morgante]

> I'm actually open to be proven wrong, but I'm not sure that makes much of a difference in terms of how compensation is justified in the real world (again, ask your employer to provide justification for salaries if you think 10x programmers exist and they are paid as such).

I've had a fairly thorough knowledge of salaries at many companies I've worked for (currently the founder of my own company) and I'm not sure what your point is. There was absolutely a large variation in salary and it clearly correlated with two factors: performance and negotiation ability. Why exactly do you think employers pay some engineers so much money? Out of the goodness of their hearts? It's due to measurable impact and differences. I've been places where I was producing more than the rest of the team in half the hours (I was in school at the time).

Your arguments about collective bargaining are precisely why I don't want a union. I sure as hell don't want you (or anyone else) bargaining for me or being tied to any generic salary formula. It's hard for me to imagine that if things were done democratically most engineers would vote for me to make what I do.

[bendoernberg]

"It's hard for me to imagine that if things were done democratically most engineers would vote for me to make what I do." It sounds like you feel the current system works out very well for a few elite performers, in a way that the majority of workers would not be comfortable with if they had a say in the matter. I'm curious, how do you see the tension/balance between what benefits the majority of engineers vs. what benefits a small number of elite performers such as yourself?

[morgante]

I come down firmly on the side of meritocracy. If you're contributing a lot more value, you deserve to be compensated more. I've spent a decade honing my abilities and it's reflected in my skill level. It'd be unfair if that skill weren't reflected in my salary.

In fact, if anything I think top developers are underpaid in most of the industry. Outside certain organizations and areas, it's hard to break $200k as a developer—even when a senior developer can easily be 2x as effective as a new grad making $100k.

Also, to be clear, the current system is better for probably the whole upper half of engineers. It's not just elite performers who would see cuts if we moved to salary formulas. The problem I see is that humans have a well-documented tendency to hurt themselves if it means they can "punish" others as well: I can people voting for a $100k mandatory salary (while they're making $110k) just to spite me for making $200k.

[bendoernberg]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm confident that well-organized engineers working together could very substantially grow the percentage of company revenues that go to engineers, which would benefit both upper and lower tier performers by growing the pie. As for the way workers might punitively divide up that larger pie, it sounds like knucklesandwhich is more knowledgeable than me about craft unions and the ways they try to mitigate against that. Presumably high-performing engineers would be a powerful bloc within such an organizing effort/union, and could advocate effectively for their interests.

[knucklesandwich]

Listen I think the meritocracy fetishization of SV is dumb and unjustifiable (again, if you really think this, propose a measurement or set of measurements that adequately explains salary and can be justified as representing "skill"), but standardizing pay is ultimately not a major interest of mine in forming a union.

You seem to believe there are separate stratifications of tech workers that do not have shared interests. Even though I pretty strongly disagree, you're in luck, a union is still what you want. You want a craft union that recognizes something like "senior engineers" as a collective bargaining unit. As long as you can justify that you constitute a real unit with a shared "community of interest" to the NLRB, you can still collectively bargain only with other senior engineers.

[chimeracoder]

> The AMA for example, does not engage in collective bargaining with the management of a hospital and has no legal right to compel such a thing under the NLRA. The AMA does however lobby politicians and puts its people on medical boards to limit the supply of doctors.

This is a common misconception.

The AMA does not limit the supply of doctors. The AAMC (used to) limit the supply of doctors, but (a) they have been trying for the last 10+ years to increase that, and (b) the actual number of practicing physicians is bottlenecked by funding for residency positions, which is funded by Medicare, not the AMA or AAMC. The AMA has actually lobbied to increase funding for GME, which would increase the supply of practicing physicians.

The AMA does not represent doctors in any meaningful sense - only 25% of physicians belong to the AMA, and only because membership is required for licensing the CPT codes that those doctors need for billing. The AMA does not consistently advocate for physicians' best interests, and in the last couple of decades, it has actually consistently sided against physicians' best interests.

[knucklesandwich]

The AMA _did_ lobby (I should have clarified that they no longer do this) to restrict medicare funding for residency: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/01/us/doctors-assert-there-ar...

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/29/business/curbing-the-suppl...

At one point the AMA had about 75% of American doctors as members but has declined for various reasons (growth of specialty professional associations, change of employment in which many doctors have gone from private practices to hospitals which has accompanied a change in political objectives, etc.). The AMA probably does still serve as a professional association in the interest of some segment of doctors, but I take your point that it definitely don't work for doctors writ large. This is actually a good example of why professional associations can be inadequate, because they fundamentally are limited to advocacy for a profession instead of working for gains for a workplace.

[chimeracoder]

> The AMA _did_ lobby (I should have clarified that they no longer do this) to restrict medicare funding for residency

...twenty years ago, when we had the opposite problem. It still wasn't some act motivated by the desire to benefit doctors, even if that's the PR spin they used.

> At one point the AMA had about 75% of American doctors as members but has declined for various reasons (growth of specialty professional associations, change of employment in which many doctors have gone from private practices to hospitals which has accompanied a change in political objectives, etc.)

The move away from private practices was not the driving force behind the declining membership of the AMA. Quite bluntly, doctors stopped joining (unless they were forced to) because they did not support the AMA or its objectives. Why pay money to an organization that fights for causes you oppose?

Of course, this is only possible because (most) doctors are not required to be AMA members or pay membership fees if they choose not to, which is not true of people in most unions.

> The AMA probably does still serve as a professional association in the interest of some segment of doctors,

It does - it acts in the interest of the subset of doctors who are serving in administrative roles and are no longer practicing medicine full-time. That is to say, they advocate the interests of hospitals and payers, not practicing physicians.

> This is actually a good example of why professional associations can be inadequate,

It's not that they're "inadequate". It's that, in this case, they are literally fighting against the interests of the group they are (allegedly) advocating.

So really, the AMA is an argument against either professional associations or unions - doctors are unhappy with the AMA, and you certainly don't see them, by and large, advocating unionization in their practices en masse.

[Apocryphon]

Sounds like American doctors need a real union, then.

[mst]

> A professional association by contrast does not work to help workers in a workplace dispute.

Some don't. Some do.

I am currently a member of one that does, up to and including litigating a case is appropriate.

[knucklesandwich]

Sure, this will often happen if litigation can set some precedent that benefits the profession as a whole. For example the AMA will take up cases that can challenge legal precedent on malpractice damages limits. Sometimes these disputes can be with management, but generally these kind of interventions are done as part of professional advocacy.

However a professional association is effectively limited in what it can do in a labor dispute because management has no obligation to collectively bargain with them, hence this is not really the purpose of professional associations.

[tptacek]

I don't think shop rules are a good idea, or contractually mandated pay scales. I'm not interested in getting into the heads of every single person talking about unionization. It sounds like we agree, and should move on.

[Eridrus]

So what organising principles should a software developer union have?

It's easy to say they could be anything we want it to be, but I'm not sure there's a real consensus on any particular principle.

Lots of people who talk about unions seem to value privacy protections for consumers, but there are clearly software developers writing this software who have a different view.

Ubers reputation has been trash for almost as long as Uber has existed, I feel like most people are there to get rich, do you expect those people to go on strike for a grievance that doesn't affect them?

[knucklesandwich]

Without a fair equity package, none of those employees are going to get any kind of payout from an exit. And given the number of fundraising rounds Uber has undergone: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber/funding-rounds and their difficulty in actually turning a profit: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-25/uber-lose... it seems a little questionable that anyone from the rank-and-file is going to get rich at Uber.

A union is what gives you the ability confront management about these kinds of things.

[TheCoelacanth]

There are a lot of labor practices that most software developers would agree on changing: unpaid overtime, unreasonable on-call requirements, lack of transparency in equity compensation, unreasonably short windows for exercising vested stock options after leaving the company.

[tristor]

Thanks to the Fair Labor Standards Act, anyone who is a software engineer is exempt from overtime pay as long as they make at least $455/week on a salary basis.[1] Hint, I don't know any software engineers making less than $23660/yr.

It's a heinously stupid regulation, and it's one which was lobbied for heavily by the tech industry to reduce labor costs. But that is the federal law of the US currently, which means yes you can be required to perform unpaid overtime.

[1]: https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/fs17e_computer.pdf

[knucklesandwich]

Not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with the person above, but just to clarify: the FLSA doesn't prevent tech workers from collectively bargaining to gain paid overtime as a condition of employment, it just determines the highest wage at which salaried workers are required by law to be paid overtime (which I agree is stupid, and should be a benefit all workers receive).

[tptacek]

Note that you can cease to be exempt if your employer begins treating you as if you were hourly and not salaried --- for instance, docking your pay in small increments, for instance because you went on strike for half a day.

[TheCoelacanth]

Yes, I'm aware. That's why I pointed it out as something that a union could change.

[scott_s]

There is aprofesssional association, but I don't think many non-academics see it as such: the ACM, http://www.acm.org/about-acm/about-the-acm-organization

[jbarham]

> Software developers have incredible leverage right now, perhaps more than any cohort of employees in the country

Hah hah, very cute. A trivial proof that this claim is false: H-1B.

Indentured H-1B visa workers have absolutely zero leverage. American software developers are constantly reminded that if they don't behave and do what they're told that their jobs will be outsourced or they'll be replaced by H-1B workers. I say this as an ex-H-1B holder, who left the US six years ago for Australia (where I'm now a citizen).

Young American programmers will do well to read Norman Matloff's blog at https://normsaysno.wordpress.com/ where he exhaustively documents the abuse of American IT workers and ask themselves how they plan to make a living after the age of 40.

[tptacek]

This does not square even a little bit with the software employment market I'm familiar with, not only in California but in the Midwest.

If you believe that H1-B employees are abused in software development shops, that's all the more reason to organize.

[patio11]

I think we're getting a bit of a "you see a trunk, I see a tail" view of a very large elephant here.

Think of the most scutwork of scutwork programming jobs in the industry, or even quasi-programming quasi-IT jobs like, I don't know, Sharepoint administrator at a regional insurance carrier or line programmer at a university (where most projects are "execute a SQL query to get a list of students in a particular course then, and this is the hard part, display it on a web page"). Tata doesn't simply manufacture billions of dollars in services revenue; actual companies pay them actual money to outsource work. Actual companies also pay actual money for Tata to send 6k engineers at $75k apiece to the US. That's like half-a-Google worth of engineers; add in Infosys and you approach a full Google, except at something like 30 cents on the dollar.

AppAmaGooBookSoft consume the H1B program in an entirely different fashion and Tata is more-or-less orthogonal to the startup world. You can fashion a career in software which never touches the ecosystem that Tata is a part of. You can also fashion a career in software which never touches AppAmaGooBookSoft, startups, or software development shops. These two worlds are separated by a titanic gulf in conditions and expectations, and transferring between them is difficult, for much the same reasons as transferring between social classes is difficult. This does not mean that either of the two worlds does not factually exist.

You might never have been explicitly threatened with "We can trivially replace you with cheaper foreign labor." You might not even know anyone who has been, depending on who you generally hang out with. I have been in the room when that threat was made, and (because life is hilarious!) I was the literal face of the threat.

[tptacek]

I acknowledge that there are portions of the industry dominated by outsourced/offshore workers.

What I don't acknowledge is that the parts of the industry that aren't offshored are suddenly going to become offshored as a reaction to labor organization. The idea that strikers will be replaced with H1-Bs is a hollow threat.

[knucklesandwich]

Guest workers aren't a reason not to organize though, they're just a reason it might be more difficult to organize certain shops (though not impossible, take a look at the FLOC who has been able to organize thousands of guest workers).

[jbarham]

> If you believe that H1-B employees are abused...

Of course that would never happen. All American business executives and outsourcing agencies only act with unimpeachable integrity and the highest ethical standards.

(Wait, what is the original subject of this thread again...)

I repeat, for all American programmers under the age of 35, read https://normsaysno.wordpress.com/ to see how your careers are being systematically undermined by your own industry and political leaders. Then make alternative career plans for when you're 40+. You'll thank me later.

[morgante]

> Then make alternative career plans for when you're 40+.

Your alternative careers plans can and should be the possibility of retirement.

It is extremely possible as a software engineer to save enough to retire by the time you're 35.

[bishnu]

It's only leverage because software developers have no solidarity. So yes, an individual can be threatened by this, but in reality the US government only grants 65 000 H-1Bs per year; Such a threat could be made easily irrelevant by even a modicum of organizing.