[zxcvbn4038]

I had a boss who moved a guy from Russia to the US just so he could fire him. He was gone ten days after he arrived and all the paperwork was done. I guess that worker protections in Russia were really strong at the time, the guy was untouchable while he was there.

[garbagecoder]

That's a crime in California. Labor Code section 1050[1]

[1]:https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....

[busterarm]

I hope you got a different boss soon after.

[junon]

Yeah exactly. Stop being a bystander to shitty company practices. A lot of them have forgotten that their employees make them profitable and scalable.

[EatingWithForks]

I agree we shouldn't stand for shitty employers. But, especially right now, it can be hard for a dev to find a job. Especially if the dev has dependents taking up time for take home tests etc. Or if they have a visa the employer needs to manage.

I suggest we should have something like an actor's guild instead, where a floor of basic protections are necessary but there's no ceiling on payment and benefits.

[atlasunshrugged]

What's the difference between that and a union?

[slg]

There isn't any. The Screen Actors Guild is a union that merged with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists union to make what the grandparent comment is likely referring to as the "actor's guild". They are a traditional labor union and member of the AFL-CIO. They are also seemingly poised to go on strike at the end of next month.

Often times when someone criticizes the idea of unions, it is because they don't fully understand their purpose, flexibility, and flaws. For example, that comment could imply that unions somehow cap payments and benefits, but that isn't some universal truth of unions (that person also could just be using guild as a synonym for union, but that isn't necessarily true and it doesn't appear to be how they're using it). Unions negotiate on behalf of their members. If the union members don't want caps on compensation, the union can negotiate for no caps.

[ghaff]

And it may be worth noting that "aspiring actor" is probably not considered the epitome of someone on a guaranteed safe and lucrative career path. But it does guarantee that if they can land a job, they're going to get paid scale (~$1k/day I believe).

[Buttons840]

Is it realistically possible to be a actor or screen writer without joining this union? If not, then isn't the union itself a monopoly and a form of tyranny?

[ncallaway]

The actor’s guild is a union.

There are lots of different unions with lots of different structures. This person is saying we should have a union with a structure similar to that union.

[Animats]

Yes. The Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839, is a good model for a programmer's union.[1] TAG represents animators at Disney, Sony, and some lesser studios. (Mostly Disney now, because Disney acquired everybody else.)

This is the current Master Agreement.[2] It specifies minimum wages, but not maximums. "Nothing in this Agreement shall prevent any individual from negotiating and obtaining from the Producer better conditions and terms of employment than those herein provided."

See section 5, "Hours". "Time worked on the employee's sixth workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification. Time worked on the employee's seventh workday of the workweek shall be paid at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification. Minimum call for the sixth and seventh days shall be four (4) hours. ... All time worked in excess of fourteen (14) consecutive hours (including meal periods) from the time of reporting to work shall be Golden Hours and shall be paid at two (2) times the applicable hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification."

These are standard union terms in Hollywood. This is why film scheduling is a discipline but software development scheduling is a joke. Hollywood has crunches, and they hit the producer's budget hard. So planning goes into avoiding crunches.

Despite significant efforts, TAG has been unable to unionize game developers.

[1] https://animationguild.org/

[2] https://animationguild.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2018-2...

[snowwrestler]

Nothing, it is a union.

[jylam]

"But, especially right now, it can be hard for a dev to find a job. "

What ?

[sveme]

A couple of friends and myself got laid off in Germany a short while ago - was really tough finding a new job. Very different compared to a year ago. Same for friends from the US and especially the UK.

[brokensegue]

are you unaware of major layoffs at major employers?

[Insanity]

There are plenty of jobs (and recruiters) still reaching out. Just for smaller companies than the tech giants.

[nawgz]

Are you implying that companies that grew by a factor of two during COVID laying off 10% of their staff means that software is no longer eating the world?

There are endless dev jobs, the market's a little softer for pay thanks to megacap collusion once again, but I see an endless list of jobs online...

[devnullbrain]

They're already hiring again

[edgyquant]

Those have been mostly non-dev roles

[moffkalast]

> "But, especially right now, it can be hard for a dev to find a comically overpaid FAANG job."

I think that's what they meant

[tinglymintyfrsh]

American workers are the wimpiest creatures on the planet. That's why they don't have unions, tolerate horrible bosses, and have few protections.

[dang]

Could you please stop posting flamewar comments, including nationalistic flamewar comments, to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

[_8j50]

It's not wimpiness, it's an essential acceptance of cruelty that is accepted as a neccessary part of the american psyche where not just individuals but businesses have that freedom.

"If I was the company owner or the boss, I might do that to in order to protect my money"

[Clent]

You're describing a mental illness and yet I still agree with you.

[kashunstva]

> American workers are the wimpiest creatures on the planet

American workers do put up with a lot. But the cruelty of having one’s health care access perfectly intertwined with employment probably explains much of their reluctance to engage in the sort of individual and collective action needed to address malignant employer behaviour.

[nsxwolf]

This is starting to collapse with the shift towards high deductible plans and HSA accounts. Increasingly, employers are just providing a subsidy for something that partially covers you when you get cancer. You'll pay for everything else yourself.

[moneywoes]

Seems easy to say when you have healthcare coverage

[OJFord]

They don't? All the tech companies I hear about having unions are American. (They are also big I suppose, but when I worked at Arm in the UK there were frequently outsiders sort of 'protesting' for employees to join. I was never aware of anyone caring who worked there.)

It seems weird to me to have professional unions, doctors are an outlier there, where it's common, and (partly I suppose because) there isn't a professional institution (which overlap slightly) - it's split between unions and the GMC (licencing body, and as a doctor you'd whistle-blow to them for example).

I'd like to see more software engineers be professionally registered, and it be more worthwhile to. (Yes, quite chicken-and-egg I'm sure.) I'm a member of the IET, but to be honest their light on software-relevance. The chartership requirements for example seemed like they would require quite a bit of bullshitting (not lying exactly, just sort of business-speak style forcing something to fit the very specific irrelevant questions) to satisfy; I abandoned it, so far at least.

[nielsbot]

A commenter below mentions unions.

This could be the answer.

I think tech workers so far have been paid and treated well (at least where I work) and so haven't felt the need to unionize. But having a union would certainly protect against these kinds of problems. (Being relocated and then immediately laid off)

[busterarm]

I was a member of three different unions before I ever switched careers to tech and being able to (and expected to) negotiate my own contracts was one of the biggest factors in me ending up in this industry. I have certainly made orders of magnitude more money and under substantially better conditions.

My experiences in unions were awful and I would never go back to that.

[nielsbot]

What industry did you work in before?

[joshmarlow]

I actually think this is the core cause of a lot of current popular hate of capitalism - shitty managers (I'm thinking the /r/antiwork sort of sentiment). People conflate shitty managers with how the system intrinsically works, which is an over simplification.

Now there is an argument that operating in our 'capitalist' system introduces incentives to be a shitty manager (I think this is approximately Chomsky's perspective).

[travisgriggs]

The problem that seems to expose to me, is why do we have so many (shitty) managers. Are managers just prone to be shitty?

Part of me thinks so. I think if you renamed every managers title to other titles like “clerk” and “facilitator” and basically reset what it means to be a manager, it feels like things would be different. At least for a while.

But then my theories swing back the other way. I have observed that many of my peers want to be “managed.” What they like about the arrangement is the feeling of isolated from responsibility and liability. Do as told. It’s sort of an “anti self reliance” thing. An attempt to be, as an adult, in a relationship that looks more like a subservient child-parent relationship.

[thewebcount]

> I have observed that many of my peers want to be “managed.” What they like about the arrangement is the feeling of isolated from responsibility and liability. Do as told. It’s sort of an “anti self reliance” thing. An attempt to be, as an adult, in a relationship that looks more like a subservient child-parent relationship.

What a bizarre take. I like programming, I don't like dealing with all the people stuff. I've run my own business and it involved focusing on all the things I find uninteresting and focusing very little on the things I find very interesting. So for me it's just a matter of not liking that position. This belief that everyone who isn't in management is some sort of troglodyte who can't pick their own nose is very childish.

[nradov]

Management is a skill like any other. Very few people are born competent managers but most people can be trained as such. The trouble is that most organizations promote their top individual contributors to management without giving them additional training. You'll see a lot of snarky comments on HN about MBA programs but the good ones do instill at least some basic level of competence.

Of course training alone is insufficient. The organizational culture and incentives also have to be aligned. The US military puts a major focus on training officers to be effective leaders, and yet the results have been mixed. Toxic leadership is one of the main problems driving their current retention crisis.

[bluefirebrand]

> You'll see a lot of snarky comments on HN about MBA programs but the good ones do instill at least some basic level of competence.

I strongly disagree with this. MBA programs are part of the problem in my opinion. They train people to be good "managers" for a company's interests which is often actively hostile to the people who report into that manager.

The MBA-ification of management and companies is to treat people like units of work not humans.

[MisterBastahrd]

Managers? Define "managers."

We just saw multiple banks collapse with zero financial penalty for those who were in charge when it happened, even as they were collecting tens of millions in bonuses.

When your compensation is structured in such a way that you can be a monumental failure at your job and you STILL make hundreds of times more than the rank and file employee, then the system is broken.

This is an ownership class problem, not manager class. The owners and their lackeys are the ones approving and justifying these insane compensation packages even as companies lay people off.

[r00fus]

What you’re describing is an Oligarchy. Which is technically what the US is.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/cbo-american-wealt...

[concordDance]

Note that reddit in general, those whose posts rise in particular and posts that rise to the top of that subreddit even more in particular, is extremely unrepresentative of actually common sentiment.

To get an a less biased view you can chat to people on public transport (in Europe) or talk to your neighbours (in the USA).

[Eisenstein]

> Note that reddit in general, those whose posts rise in particular and posts that rise to the top of that subreddit even more in particular, is extremely unrepresentative of actually common sentiment.

Why?

[concordDance]

A whole bunch of different effects, present on most forms of social media:

Evaporative cooling (if an environment appeals to people they'll join and if an environment gets more extreme those who least like that direction will leave). The presence of visible up votes and downvotes magnifies this effect.

Founder effects. Reddit in general and any given sub in particular was initially populated with people who are a bit unusual in some fashion. E.g. the initial reddit population was very techy. This effect also applies to any Internet forum (both in that Internet forums are used by somewhat odd people like us and that an Internet forum on Thing will pull people interested in Thing and interest in Thing very likely correlates with many other factors, such as socioeconomic status, culture, gender, subculture)

General interest in going online to talk about things. The vast majority of people do not go online to talk and argue with strangers, those who do are different along a number of axes (such as a lack of young kids or higher disagreeableness) which in turn correlate with other traits and beliefs.

In Reddit case there's also an element of active moderation, mostly due to founder effects, but also due to them being the only ones actually caring a lot (being activist) the main subs are policed by a bunch of supermoderators (who are mods in hundreds of subs) with similar views on issues such as trans rights and as a moral duty will actively attempt to remove people who express other viewpoints to keep the place tidy (without the viewpoints that are offensive and wrong).

[giantrobot]

Reddit has a severe astroturfing problem. Any subreddit that gets any attention (or ends up in /r/all) gets hammered with socket puppets and astroturf campaigns. Groups can very cheaply buy upvotes for pretty much anything.

Reddit has shown little appetite for combating this issue because their value is the number of eyeball-seconds they receive every day. They want to report huge eyeball numbers you investors and advertisers.

[JohnFen]

Because the population of Reddit users is not representative of the population in general. This is true for all such places (including HN).

[goodpoint]

> People conflate shitty managers with how the system intrinsically works

When the system intrinsically works by producing shitty managers the problem is in the system, by definition.

[joshmarlow]

> When the system intrinsically works by producing shitty managers the problem is in the system, by definition.

Is bad management intrinsic though? Wouldn't that make the presence of good management surprising?

It seems to me that people work better when they enjoy their job and nobody likes working under a bad manager, so bad management is a sign of incompetence and degrades operations.

The presence of bad management is an opportunity to optimize operations; treating people well is generally good for the people and the business.

[avgcorrection]

Yeah. Go up to that corporation and say: Do Better, capitalists, or I’m walkin’ out that door!

[junon]

When your best talent leaves you without any recourse, and onboarding new talent takes 3-6+ months, they will definitely start to care. My last company is imploding due to this exact scenario. They didn't want to listen to their experts and are now reaping those particular rewards.

[brewdad]

I guess the questions remains, will the management that caused your last company to implode take the right lessons with them to their next job?

[junon]

Almost certainly not, no.

[slg]

This only protects "your best talent". The company is free to mistreat all the rest of the people who don't have the unique skill set to guarantee themselves better treatment. That is capitalism working as intended.