[pm90]

If you’re gonna go with anecdotes, its been going pretty well as Valve with having no hierarchies (aka “devs in charge”).

But that sort of conversation isn’t really useful. Study after study has shown employees’ job satisfaction doesn’t scale infinitely with compensation, other things start to matter after a certain income is reached. With many highly paid software devs, I would wager they are at or beyond that point.

[erlich]

Smart companies will provide conditions that attract and retain talent. Companies can compete on culture. The market will discover the necessary incentives to bring on employees. This has already happened. Look at all the perks companies offer without any union involvement.

If management sucks and cannot listen to their employees then it’s better that they don’t get more capital/talent and their competitors suck up all their talent.

[pm90]

> If management sucks and cannot listen to their employees then it’s better that they don’t get more capital/talent and their competitors suck up all their talent.

Except thats not how it works in practice at all.

Companies can run for a long while by brutally exploiting employees if they have captured the market (look at Amazon). They can exploit immigration laws to squeeze the workers. Unions can help prevent that sort of outcomes.

Theres also that little thing where companies dying due to poor decision making is just an overall loss of value for everyone involved in the short term. Why subject society to the vagaries of laissez faire capitalism when we have the tools to prevent that?

[erlich]

You touch on a common mistake with collective bargaining. It assumes the market and landscape stay static. That the entire industry will not go through huge waves of change and huge levels of innovation will be needed to survive.

If companies suck they should die. We should not have too big to fail. Look at blockbuster vs netflix.

Companies don’t have to fail completely but certain projects should be able to fail. We don’t want huge companies expanding into everything with their sheer sales networks. We don’t want monopolies and oligopolies.

Look at amazon. It has a terrible reputation. And a monopoly. What we want and need is more competition. And it will come.

[pm90]

> It assumes the market and landscape stay static. That the entire industry will not go through huge waves of change and huge levels of innovation will be needed to survive.

Collective bargaining doesn’t assume that though?

You keep saying that “companies that suck should die”. This is just the worst kind of approach to solving any problem: do nothing, let it sort itself out, “trust the market”. Well, we’ve seen what the economy is like with strong labor and without it, and the people that are involved in the economy should get to choose the system that they prefer.