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.
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.
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).
The film and television unions are a tough nut to crack. On the west coast, that's almost all there is and if you're working you will be in the union easy. Unless you do youtube/streaming content and most of that is non-union.
On the east coast, you're going to be working probably for 10 years before you can get into your union and it's an uphill struggle the whole way.
And union or not, you're only going to get work if people like working with you. One day with a bad attitude and you can find yourself unable to get hired by anyone. Film and TV is long hours and a stressful environment and nobody wants to work with anyone who makes the day harder.
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?
What if a group of distributed "mainstream" (not sure the right term?) writers are unhappy with the rules of their employment, including the rules of their union. Are they able to organize and collectively bargain with both their employers and their union? In other words, when it comes to these large unions that dominate an industry, are sub-groups within that union able to organize and collectively bargain, forming a sub-union of sorts? My understanding is that large unions make it harder for people within the union to organize and collectively bargain, which is, of course, quite ironic.
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.
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.
The hours bit gets interesting since that also states that animators are hourly rather than salaried.
If you work less than 40 hours in a week, your paycheck is likewise adjusted.
You won't be able to work a 9/80 schedule since the payroll week starts at midnight on Sunday morning. Nor would you necessarily be granted permission.
If you work 6 hours on one day because you were out for some reason rather than 8 hours, you will not necessarily be able to make it up on other days - or even be granted permission to work overtime (because that would be time and a half pay) to compensate.
As programmers we tend to take advantage of the "if all the work gets done we get paid." Get into work at 10 am, leave at 4 pm.
Under the hours provision in that agreement I suspect many programmers would chafe a bit. Under these (and similar) provisions people are butt in a seat for 40 hours a week if they want to be fully paid. Taking a sick child to the doctor on a day for 2 hours means you will only be paid 38 hours for that week.
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.
As someone laid off from a smaller company, I’ve been competing for those jobs with the people laid off from the tech giants - for almost half a year now.
Same here. I think this month marks over 6months. What’s stranger is I don’t even see jobs in job boards anymore, at least not ones that don’t look shady. Most of what I see now on say… LinkedIn is spam postings from iffy looking recruiting firms and consultancies.
Nobody is reaching out to me... and I don't even see job openings I can send my resume anymore.
For example if go to "who is hiring" and do a search for c++ I find almost nothing. The few c++ Jobs that do exist require you to already live nearby because they can't offer relocation assistance or VISA sponsorship.
Meanwhile same search years ago I would find plenty of cool openings to send my resume to.
I am not even getting recruiter spam anymore where people offer me jobs that are unrelated to my skillset.
I was looking for a job 2-3 months ago and the market wasn’t great, but I got solid leads for C++ dev positions at a number of companies. Ended up calling off further contact since I luckily secured a position fairly quickly, but if you’re interested shoot me an e-mail (address in profile) and I’d be happy to forward you the details of the companies/positions.
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...
If ExampleCo laid off 1000 javascript developers last week and is trying to hire 20 ML developers this week, then it's true to say they're hiring again, but it's also true that it can be hard for a dev to find a job.
just curious - is there a real world scenario where a company has 1k "javascript" developers and can also lay them off without crippling their position in a given market?
follow up - what market and which company(FAANG counts but must be a single org)?
edit: down votes. look i get the math but who laid off 1k js devs?
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.
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"
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.