> Despite their futuristic sheen, tech companies “actually operate like traditional industrialists and will go through old fashioned methods of suppressing workers,” he says.
Exactly. I would consider myself pretty conservative and a little bit libertarian and I fully support the rights of workers to unionize.
I dislike when governments get involved and starts forcing employees to join unions.
But if you want to unionize, you have that right. If the companies don't want to play ball, they can fire you and waste time and money trying to hire an all new workforce.
Union activities are essentially price-fixing. We let employees in unions "collude" and "exert anti-competitive influence" because we want to give them more market power relative to companies.
When you talk about giving unions as free associations, it's fair to ask whether companies should share the same rights -- if tech workers can get together and agree not to work without a pay rise, shouldn't tech companies be allowed to get together and agree not to increase pay?
I think if we're going to distinguish between those cases it should be on pragmatic grounds, because I don't think talking about principles (or any "natural right" divorced from the simple letter of the law) here is terribly useful.
Tech companies have colluded on the hiring side in the past. But here is the difference. Companies are meant to be entities that provide economic activity through competition (for example on free markets), that's why governments grant them charters that give them tons of rights people don't get (limited liability and special tax rules for example). Unions are designed by workers to protect their rights, originally this was simply through them organizing through their right of free association before the government got involved in it (because they recognize the grant of rights they gave to companies made for an unfair situation in the labor market). Importantly one is something designed to encourage economic activity, and the other is something designed to protect rights.
So no companies should not share the same "rights", because that's called being anti-competitive. Labor unions are only capable of "exert[ing] anti-competitive influence" when unions have recruited every worker (probably for a good reason) or companies engage in union busting against workers who have done nothing wrong (except talk to a union). Don't want to deal with organizing employees? Don't sign a contract with them (the employee-employer relationship also granting companies a bunch of useful rights).
Fair point. You could also say it makes certain sense vis-a-vis the company shareholders (be it the founders, or stockholders) being "colluding" and "price-fixing" on the other end of the employment deal.
> Earlier this month, after five years of organizing, security officers for companies including Facebook, Google, and Genentech, many of whom were making between $12 and $14 an hour, ratified their first union contract. They won wage increases of up to $1.20 per hour, better health care, and, for the first time, paid holidays.
How is this rational? Do Facebook and Google believe they are facing no advanced persistent threats capable of bribing someone who lives in the Bay Area on $12/hour?
The sad thing is that while I sort of understand from a business perspective why Google et al don't want to end up with a massive low-skill workforce that isn't directly relevant to their business, the number of security guards you need is directly proportional to your office footprint (i.e. you aren't going to wake up one day and find you've suddenly got more of them than you have tech workers). And I'll say the same for maintenance / custodial staff and food workers. Honestly, just pay all these people a decent wage - the impact on the company's bottom line will be a rounding error.
Those folks do physical security. Aside from access to buildings and stuff they have access to little else, plus they have supervisors and people at the company who supervise them, plus doing weird things will trigger alerts and stuff, so I don't think they can do a lot beside ignore alarms for an intruder who would not have access to digital assets. Plus, NDAs are pretty powerful tools.
I mean, if a guard lets you in, what are you gonna do, steal a laptop which is encrypted and requires 2FA? The only places which might have richer targets are research and prototyping facilities which I imagine have additional safeguards.
Physical access is always the single most important aspect of your security stance. There is almost no technical safeguard that will stop someone with physical access and time.
I don't think big companies allow employees to have the crown jewels on their co issued devices. They would have to remote into something even they don't have physical security access into.
> They would have to remote into something even they don't have physical security access into.
Which they do from their... "co issued devices". And in the days of keys over passwords being standard practice (but 2FA not yet), pwning a worker's device can be very useful even if all the real targets are on remote servers.
A missing U2F key might trigger an audit which could lead to discovery of the keylogger. Better bet would be to get the passwords, and then come back and register a second U2F key to the victims account.
Datacenters, from my understanding are different. They may have hired guards but also have a smaller contingent of actual employees --guarding, doing maintenance, monitoring, upgrading, etc., etc. In addition to rings of security.
If they can’t do basic, physical security correctly, it kind of calls into question their broader approach? For example, I imagine it’s much easier to socially engineer yourself into other access once your inside the campus than from without.
Even if the security guard is paid $200/hour, it doesn't matter. If someone puts a gun to your head, you're going to comply - nothing is worth your life. This is a large part of the reason why militaries spend much more time on psychological molding of their soldiers, because it's much, much easier to convince somebody to put themselves in the line of fire for Reasons than it is for a paycheck. The kind of security folk who actually are willing to put themselves in the line of fire for a paycheck (mercenaries) simply do not exist in the numbers needed for manning private sector security across the economy, so again, the pay is largely irrelevant.
The real purpose of security guards is to raise the cost of an attack, in terms of the number of people needed to carry out an attack. A larger attack party translates into the jackpot being divided into more payouts, and therefore the jackpot needs to be larger in order to justify the attack, not to mention the increased risks involved with coordinating a larger-scale attack (keeping opsec etc.). One security guard is easily subdued by a lone wolf attacker, or avoided. Multiple teams of roving security guards need much more coordination to subdue or avoid, without raising an alarm.
Even if you are interested in bribing a security guard, again, a single security guard doesn't provide much protection, but the more security guards on each shift, besides the amount of money needed to bribe all of them, each additional guard raises the risk of the bribe being reported and the attack failing.
Precisely because many security guards are needed for effective security, the ease of training new security guards, and the ease of hiring new ones, are security guard wages relatively low.
What’s rational is that people are accepting positions at those pay rates. If you don’t want $12 per hour, go somewhere willing to pay more — even fast food pays more than that in the Bay Area. Entry level at Target pays over $15. They don’t need a union, they just need to quit and go work somewhere else. No shortages of jobs in the Bay Area— essentially everyone is hiring right now.
Why should the company be blamed when people keep lining up to work for the wages on offer?
Does anyone buying bananas at Safeway just randomly decide to pay more than the asking price? Of course not. It’s the same with companies.
> They don’t need a union, they just need to quit and go work somewhere else.
Not easy if you live paycheck-to-paycheck, which most such people do. Can't afford the time it takes to find a better-paying job, or more likely, retrain before searching for such a job.
Just because a vulnerable person allows you to take advantage of them, doesn't make it ok.
If you can see that your employees are struggling to survive (and on $15/hr in Silicon Valley, you can about guarantee that they are) it would be in your best interest to give them a raise. But most of all, it's the human thing to do.
We don't have to live in a world where everyone is angling to squeeze every last drop from everyone else.
I take it you have never worked in retail because the difference would be immediately obvious.
Why work at large Bay Area tech:
- Free catered breakfast, lunch and dinner
- Free gourmet coffee
- Free snacks
- Free drinks
- Free company merch: t-shirts, backpacks, jackets, tickets to events, etc.
- Nice offices
- Nice bathrooms
My question was specifically about the rationality of offering these wages, not about accepting them. Whether or not companies deserve blame for the employees taking jobs with low pay, that wasn't my question at all. My question is whether it makes sense to entrust security to people with low pay.
By your argument, it doesn't; a single well-placed argument from you can have all the security guards from Google tomorrow and someone helpful in every aisle at Target.
And I can't tell you much about bananas but in my first tech job out of college my management sat me in a room one day and said, "We think you're doing a good job so we're going to pay you more." Apparently this is called a "raise" and is not uncommon? There must be some rationality behind it, even though I've never give a so-called "raise" to a banana.
Wages set by the free market can be below what is necessary to survive, and it is our job as citizens to ensure public policy exists (and yes, unions) to ensure wage floors that allow people to live with dignity and without chronic stress from the fear of destitution. You don’t have to agree with this sentiment of course, that’s what votes, elections, and the ability to organize are for.
There was a very small detail that was almost overlooked in the article- it seemed like they were planning on keeping their more senior engineers and fire their junior ones.
> The tipping point came in January, when management offered additional stock to a handful of high-level male engineers, including Westergard. Employees suspected Lanetix planned to fire lower-level female engineers, ...
On the one hand, this sounds to me like they're probably struggling financially, and the unionization efforts would have put them in a worse spot. This is pure speculation, however, because the article kept focusing on the gender of the employees. Maybe that really is the story, but so many details were left out to focus on the narrative that we won't know without better journalism.
Seems like very poor management and people skills. Also it's probably not a good idea to backstop a pre-product startup with bootcamp engineers regardless of gender. The foundation is set early on which is very costly to change. No wants to be changing data models and relationships when there are mission critical features that need to be done.
Is the implication that bootcamp engineers will come up with the wrong data models and relationships? I bet Hackbright teaches you more about SQL than my entire CS degree from MIT did. (I took a graduate-level database class for a few weeks before dropping it; apart from that, I can't remember anything else about databases in theory, let alone SQL and ORMs in practice.)
The origin of the education doesn't matter so much as the implied lack of real-world experience. I'd hazard a guess that a third of the engineers I've worked with had a CS degree, and in the world of web and mobile there aren't many places that matters.
On the other hand, bootcamps in particular teach you a basic grasp of the "in" technologies that will look good on a resume. Having a few on your team is often a good thing. Having too many, or having too pressing of a deadline to properly mentor them is a terrible thing for everyone involved.
> “It became increasingly clear that their strategy was divide and conquer—flatter a handful of us in the hopes that we would go along with their plans, and not put up a fight when they fired half of our co-workers,” Westergard adds.
But seriously, what were they thinking? How could they have been so blatant?
> In mid-January, after most of the unit signed authorization cards to be represented by the union, Lanetix was informed and the union filed papers with the NLRB. Ten days later, the engineers were fired.
That the firing of the whole staff was stupid and illegal was not in doubt, which is why I didn't really bother addressing it.
Rather, I wish the article had bothered to answer your question. I can hypothesize all day that they were in financial trouble and making rash decisions as a result, but the author didn't bother trying to find the truth, only present a narrative.
OK, maybe they were desperate. But couldn't they have admitted that, and tried to negotiate deals with their engineers? Although I guess it's arguable that they were trying, with the offers to senior staff. But still, it was poorly done.
>There was a very small detail that was almost overlooked in the article- it seemed like they were planning on keeping their more senior engineers and fire their junior ones.
This seemed pretty clear in the article? They tried to buy off senior male employees with extra stock options last minute.
>Maybe that really is the story, but so many details were left out to focus on the narrative that we won't know without better journalism.
It felt like there was a fair amount of detail to me. If anything, it exposed how much sexism in tech is something management sees as a useful wedge to divide and conquer workers.
My point was that, without knowing the management's perspective, it's entirely possible that gender was merely a coincidence of having senior males available, and hiring junior females either because they were the best available or the company wanted to look diverse. Perhaps they were flagging and needed to cut the junior developers so the senior developers could focus on getting back on track.
Either way, it's impossible to know, because without more details all we are left with is the agenda of an author who isn't interested in presenting the truth (or providing sufficient evidence to support it).
Edit: consider the following scenario: you have a team of male developerd; maybe they were friends when they pitched the idea for a product to you. After a few months, there's a big backlog, and they want to hire junior developers to train and take off some of the pressure. To embrace diversity, you hire a bunch of women who recently graduated from a boot camp to round out your all white male staff.
Fast forward a year. Everyone has become a tight knit team, but the pressure to deliver mounts. Instead of getting faster, they're all bogged down with refactors and endless pull request revisions of things that aren't working out. You are running out of money, so you decide to cut the junior developers, and try to bribe the senior devs with some of the cost savings to make up for all the extra hours they'll now be working. Uh oh! You're only firing the women! They all band together, oblivious to the fact that you literally won't be able to keep them all on.
I'm not saying this is what happened. What happened could have been pure sexism and anti-labor mentality. BUT pushing such an agenda without KNOWING that is the case here doesn't do anyone any favors.
I guess I’m not sure why we’re to believe that your perspective on the situation is somehow more valid or absent a similar “agenda” you ascribe to the journalist. The journalist spoke to the people involved who described their motivations (which sure seems to be at least partially informed by perceived sexism), while you’re just making speculative assertions about “management’s perspective.” And because management seemingly handled the situation so poorly and in violation of labor laws, it’s not like they’re going to go on the record anyway...
that's the point; it isn't at all. It is, in fact, pure speculation based on information that is missing from the article.
The fact that the article is missing such important information could be because it's not available, or it might not fit the author's agenda.
The company is very clearly in the wrong here; I'm taking issue with the heavy handedness of forcing gender into a story that, based on the evidence presented, could easily be a clear cut labor issue.
It’s not pure speculation- it’s the worker’s side of the story. You can’t discredit their experience because the other side behaved in such a brazenly stupid fashion that they’re probably being advised to not speak to the press at all. Even if management’s perspective was included in the article, corresponded to your framing, the same would hold true. Your skepticism isn’t really skepticism when it leans consistently in favor of one party or the other.
You've got to be stupid to retaliate against workers unionizing. They're going to get screwed.
I don't think unionizing was going to save their jobs though. Looks like the business wasn't doing too well, and they were trying to jettison their juniormost engineers. The whole thing was probably going to go under.
> The tipping point came in January, when management offered additional stock to a handful of high-level male engineers, including Westergard. Employees suspected Lanetix planned to fire lower-level female engineers, many of whom graduated from Hackbright, an all women’s coding boot camp, as did the female engineer fired in November.
What's the full story here?
Layoffs typically happen when a company has cashflow issues preventing it from meeting payroll. "Low level" (read: low paid) employees of any kind are _not_ the first on the chopping block, but on the contrary, the higher paid employees who each cost x3-4 times or more.
Moreover, why would they get rid of most/all female engineers like that? Among other problems, that would expose them to an open-and-shut discrimination case, since sex is a protected class.
This, in conjunction with the fact they decided to pay the senior engineers even more, tells me there's something more to this story.
Maybe I’m just hopelessly jejune but I find it hard to believe in 2018 moustache-twiddling top-hat wearing Capitalist fatcats were like bwahahaha let’s sack all the women.
Of course they absolutely deserve to be sued into oblivion, I just don’t see the gender angle, correlation is not causation.
Edit: oh I see, they were hired from a gender-segregated bootcamp. So sexism is baked into the company’s DNA.
Tech companies used the same strategy in the 1970s, offering employees high salaries and sweet perks to make collective action less appetizing.
That doesn't make sense to me... I think it's more likely that tech workers get higher salaries because they were/are in high demand, not to prevent unionization.
Employees suspected Lanetix planned to fire lower-level female engineers, many of whom graduated from Hackbright, an all women’s coding boot camp
I am generally skeptical about bootcamps. In my experience they typically only teach very specific skills, but don't teach fundamental concepts. That makes it hard to pick up new skills, which is required from software engineers. Is it possible that this is the reason Lanetix was planning on firing them?
EDIT: I took a look at the website of Hackbright. I'm very skeptical about this bootcamp. The bootcamps is 16k for 12 weeks. They seem to teach full-stack programming in 8 weeks (python, flask, postgres, html, css, javascript, jquery, git). That gives students about a half a week per technology.
The last four weeks seem to be reserved only for interview prep and computer science fundamentals that are needed for interviews.
Their website implies that the skills they teach will empower students to work at famous tech companies, e.g. "Companies that use Python include Google, Yelp and Dropbox to name a few. Mastering Python here will help you start thinking like an engineer. You can feel confident that you’ll walk out of the door ready to tackle any engineering role.".
> That doesn't make sense to me... I think it's more likely that tech workers get higher salaries because they were/are in high demand, not to prevent unionization.
The inverse is exactly that, though. Higher wages give certain skilled individuals enough personal comfort to the point that they don't feel they need to stick their neck out for some group of randos. Sure, that $125k job with a small sack of RSUs looks pretty on paper, but break it down with all of the extra-curricular obligations, the occasional long week that happens a little too often, housing costs, commuting, and it doesn't look too appealing.
Once you have enough 'highly' paid individuals in a group -- we'll cut the number at $100k, even though that's the poverty level in the Bay Area -- then a backbuilding narrative begins to create itself, that because 'everyone' is at a a certain level, it's kind of just okay.
The trope of high demand, low supply of qualified individuals is pervasive in tech recruiting, to the point where some of the same individuals being oppressed question if there's an actual problem. It could also be explained away as that we're all just that unique and special, but that's stitching together another reality entirely.
Instead of agreeing that fellow humans are being oppressed, we tech workers muse and question the merit of sticking together, for one another. We question the quality of one's skills or ability to comprehend with not another thought. We even sometimes question if we're overly compensated, when overt actions or results would prove otherwise.
When the means of production is concentrated, some kind of worker combination is a logical response.
But we're richer now, well-fed and well-entertained, so although the concentration is greater than ever (cf agrarian or industrial times), it's not as motivating.
Personal anecdata: every company I've worked at would have been worse off (and worse to work at) if the developers had been unionized.
I've also avoided working anywhere that thinks you can only be professional if you're wearing a button down shirt and / or a tie, so I don't doubt that some places might benefit.
Edit: to be clear, I've never advocated for a union, and I doubt I ever will so long as I am fortunate enough to choose my employer, rather than the other way around. This is why, I am guessing, so many tech workers don't bother attempting to unionize.
At each of the companies I've worked at in this field, management and developers had a close and healthy relationship.
Introducing collective bargaining would only have created an artificial distance between individuals.
One company stands out as a good example. Great benefits, sub par pay. They actively solicited feedback on a regular basis, and at one point gave out near universal raises when they introduced pay bands. They also realized that limited vacation but unlimited sick time was being abused by a minority, and changed to a PTO system that was far more fair to the majority of employees.
He'll, one of them had paid "overtime" even though we were salaried (havent had to work more than 40 at any of the others).
In short, we got everything we needed, and it has been fair. Some employees individually bargained for more time off, or for work from home time, or higher pay. Some were put on performance plans and improved, some were let go (and some not nearly soon enough).
IMHO, collectively bargaining contracts at any of those places would have been less successful at making everyone happy.
>In short, we got everything we needed, and it has been fair. Some employees individually bargained for more time off, or for work from home time, or higher pay.
There is nothing preventing a union from bargaining a system like this. We have this at my work.
Everyone gets 20days off for holiday, but other than that we have a 12.5% annual bonus ('13th month') with a system where people can opt for 7.5% bonus in return for more days off. This is just an example you can set the percentage yourself.
Or you can put it towards your pension, life insurance... idk there is a whole range of options.
A union could bargain for that, true. But, when you've already got it, there's a real concern that starting one will make difficult the already good relationship with management.
As usual, we never seem to be able to learn from the past, except by accidentally reinventing it under a different name. I wonder why the software industry is so uniquely stricken by such monumental hubris?
Engineers, Lawyers and Doctors have professional associations rather than unions. Arguably, this is what software engineer should have. The American Medical Association (AMA) is extraordinarily influential.
Edit: one could argue the difference between a professional association and a union is a matter of degrees. A professional association certainly seems an easier sell. Possibly a professional association with aspects of a union could be considered.
All of those professional associations were enshrined with their exclusive rights by law. We live in a democracy, and the law is at least nominally enacted for the public good. The case for requiring professional licensure was that it would protect the public from unqualified practitioners, and it would allow bad apples to be held to account.
If you want a professional association like engineers, lawyers or doctors, it needs to have a clear public benefit. Benefiting software developers is not enough. That is one of the important differences between a professional association and a union.
Disclosure: I am a licenced professional engineer (software).
If you want a professional association like engineers, lawyers or doctors, it needs to have a clear public benefit. Benefiting software developers is not enough. That is one of the important differences between a professional association and a union.
I think in practice, the line is much fuzzier than you describe. Union rights are also written into law with the implication that they benefit society directly and indirectly. An electricians' union at least ostensibly benefits society through making certain qualified people engage in electrical work and even having qualified medical attendants has obvious benefits.
Of course, one can point to huge potential benefits to society from making certain that various sorts of software is constructed correctly so the case for a professional software engineers' association isn't that hard.
Why wouldn't you want a contract with your employer? Top executives have contracts and professional athletes have contracts. My contract is I can be fired at any time for any reason, or no reason.
Most of those that you mentioned are considered professions that require some sort of specialized training and/or board certification with some sort of oversight body. While they don't engage in collective bargaining, they do serve to control who is allowed to practice a given profession, thereby limiting the pool of qualified individuals.
While different from a union, these professional bodies serve some of the same functions in the end (raising wages, establishing standards, etc.)
In Alberta, Canada, professional engineers are barred from joining unions. While not universal, it is quite common for provincial engineering associations to bar their members from joining unions. Engineers are also exempt from many labour law protections (overtime, minimum wage, vacation time, etc.). Needless to say, I am not exactly happy with the current state of affairs.
I don't know about FAANG but definitely needed for small startups where exploitation is very real. For example, your manager should not be allowed to contact you in the middle of the night to discuss work. You should not have to come in over the weekend because you are afraid to get fired. You also should be able to negotiate better conditions in lieu of the "startup haircut" pay.
Of course this doesn't apply to well run startups with good leaders, but the truth is in my experience, they are rare and few.
The whole industry could benefit, much like the men who worked under American tycoons of the 18th century in steel mills, oil fields and other shitty conditions, software engineering is engineering period.
Just because you can't hold and physically touch the output from software engineers doesn't mean that it's somehow less demanding or not deserving of the same unionization that other laborers/engineers have access to.
I used to work at Google. Without going into specifics in this public of a forum, yes I've personally witnessed examples of unjustified pay disparities, due to arbitrary factors uncorrelated with job qualifications or performance.
At the very least, collective assistance could be very useful at Google in negotiating fair compensation for new hires and in sustaining that fairness over time based on performance data.
After all, Google has huge quantities of data to let them decide on compensation, the employees have extremely little and unevenly distributed access to similar data, and it doesn't feel like there is much opportunity to recover lost wages if you realize you've been underpaid compared to peers (aside from discrimination on illegal grounds).
I presume the same would help at other tech companies.
None of this requires the stereotypical fossilized rigidity that give unions a bad name, and I wouldn't want that either. Even in the US NLRA system that's not at all required.
I think you're referring to the fossilized rigidity I intended to reject in my last two sentences. A rigid pay scale is merely common in US unionism, not required.
Also, be careful not to confuse talent with performance. A slacker with amazing talent can still underperform whoever works diligently to improve and apply their skills.
As with other situations such as the insistence on face-time rather than embracing remote work, "unions are bad" is a truism in the tech industry, and a weird selective attitude towards disruption. Can't we build a better union? Why can't traditional labor dynamics be disrupted, in a way that benefits workers? The rise of the sharing economy proves that the opposite is possible.
"Even if you don't believe in unions, unions are necessary to force the hand of government. Bismarck instituted a welfare state in Germany to undercut the popularity of socialism and the left. You need unions to get to a stronger safety net, even if the powers-that-be are establishing it in opposition to them."
Not sure about it but why do they want to establish a union? History teaches us that trade unions are mafia-like structures. The cure that is much worse than the desease.
It's interesting. When I think of unions, I think of corruption. But when I think of "Gewerkschaft" (simply the German word for union) I think of worker protection.
> History teaches us that trade unions are mafia-like structures.
Not the history that I learned. That's the kind of quip you get off of libertarian blogs. The real world labor movement was just a wee bit more nuanced and important. We're literally about to celebrate Labor Day for a reason that doesn't have much to do with "mafia-like structures".
Spot on.