Oh, but my employer is different and a union would only make business more complicated and less likely to give me raises and promotions! I’m a rising star, you know.
Over here (austria) the unions, which are pretty powerful, argue on behalf of ALL employees in that field. They basically set the minimum pay/benefits across the country for the kinds of jobs they represent by negotiating with the industrial association. By law, the result of those negotiations are the baseline for everyone. And everyone can still negotiate for better terms with their employer.
One benefit the union members have over the non-union ones, though, is that you get insurance for legal counsel, for example. Other than that, union members don't have that many benefits, tbh. I still chose to be a member, because IMO it's the right thing to do.
These comments miss so much nuance. This isn't black and white.
I don't want to work for a union not because I'm a rising star. It's because I know I'm on the right of a normal distribution. I don't want to revert to median pay. No thanks.
How do you know compensation is a normal distribution, and that you are on a particular side of it? Everyone on HN thinks they are a highly-paid, irreplaceable Captain Of Industry who, by their brilliant skill and shrewd negotiating power is making much more than the average. "Surely a union would bring -my- compensation and working conditions down!" they imagine.
lol nice story. But we also have tools like Levels.fyi and networks. I have asked all my friends how much they make and some of them have spreadsheets where they track the pay of whoever they ask. It’s not that hard to get an idea where you land these days.
I also don’t want it to be hard to fire people. I’ve worked with or adjacent with 2-3 people who got fired for performance and in every case I was so glad they did and am glad I don’t live in EU or a union where the process would have been harder than it already was.
If you work at a Union place, you know the complications are absurd.
I've worked at both, and the efficiency, friendliness, experience were all absurdly better without unions. With unions, everyone was trying to get each other written up, seniority mattered more than performance, politics were half the conversations at work.
Engineering would be miserable with a union, you'd be basically locked into an employer climbing the totem pole.
After taxes, but before healthcare and the fact that most employment is at-will.
I'll take higher taxes, healthcare through general taxation and relatively strong job security over a fixed dollar amount any day. Everyone is different though.
> After taxes, but before healthcare and the fact that most employment is at-will.
That combined doesn't even remotely cost that gap of 60k per year (plus strictly speaking this is not true since many employers would provide IT people with insurance).
> I'll take higher taxes,
It's not higher taxes. It's much lower salaries + much higher taxes combined. 60k a year in savings will provide you far more security and bargaining power than any strictest EU trade code would (and this is IMO one of the reasons for higher salaries in the US).
Well. On the other hand, I can not be laid off easily, and will need to be told at least three months in advance; if my girlfriend gets pregnant, I can take a few months off, too; if the child is sick, I can stay at home too*; if I get sick, I’ll continue to get paid; if I have back pain, I can request to get expensive ergonomic equipment from my employer; if I need to see a specialist, or get insanely expensive treatment, I don’t have to worry; I have 30 days of vacation, of which I must take at least two weeks of consecutive time off, without any negative consequences for my job; if my children go to university, it’s pretty much free, as it was for me; I can’t ever get paid less by my employer, only more; I can take a few days of external educational courses of my choice every year, and my employer has to accept that (and pay for it!); and I probably forgot a bunch of other advantages here.
Specifically on insurance: how much is that worth if it’s bound to your employer? What if you get laid off and don’t find a job in time, then get sick? What if your father is laid off at 55, nobody wants to hire him anymore due to his age and he develops cancer? I can tell you what happens in Germany: nothing. Both of you go to the MD and get treated as appropriate.
You’ll never get me to trade all of this for a bit more money that I need to spend on health care, ridiculous tips, and overpriced apartments anyway.
You'd be surprised. Tech is full of special snowflakes who don't need a union because they're one of the deserving extremely talented net contributors who earned their special privileges and don't have any problems working unpaid overtime because their employer would certainly have their back if they ever needed time off or their productivity declined because of bad health or personal issues and don't want the undeserving underperforming underachievers and talentless diversity hires to get a leg up and steal their glory.
I'm not even kidding, this is almost verbatim the attitude of plenty of (white, male, able-bodied tho at times mildly autistic) developers I've talked to throughout my career and at meetups and conferences, though few would be bold enough to spell it out this explicitly. Of course in those cases where they did end up having bad luck (be it health or otherwise) their employers did not in fact have their back, at least not longer than possible without harming profitability. If anything, developers working at smaller tech companies or in technical roles at non-technical companies were worse because they'd often see unions as only relevant for jobs that were "beneath them".
Granted, most of the people I talked to were in Central and Eastern Europe.
> Of course in those cases where they did end up having bad luck (be it health or otherwise) their employers did not in fact have their back, at least not longer than possible without harming profitability.
If you think unions or taxes will “have your back” in any real sense if you fall seriously ill you will be sorely disappointed.
> Granted, most of the people I talked to were in Central and Eastern Europe.
Could have something to do with these countries having experienced full blown communism not too long ago.
> Could have something to do with these countries having experienced full blown communism not too long ago.
That's a bit of a non-sequitur if you have any idea of how the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence treated unions. Just look at modern China if you need a refresher on what authoritrian states think about workers unionizing.
Also unions are not communism and neither did any of those countries ever experience "communism". The USSR never claimed to have "achieved communism", in fact the expression "real socialism" (or "actually existing socialism") was coined by these governments to denounce critics who demanded steps towards communism as "utopian" idealists. China today even has a full roadmap towards communism with different labeled steps to justify why it hasn't achieved communism yet and needs to be authoritarian for just a little while longer because the state will wither away eventually really soon trust me bro.
> If you think unions or taxes will “have your back” in any real sense if you fall seriously ill you will be sorely disappointed.
Not with that attitude they won't. Do you think we got legally mandated 40 hour work weeks, paid sick leave and mandatory rest periods out of the goodness of the hearts of business owners?
Is it because of something inherent to software development, or is it just that software development became a big job category in an environment that was skeptical of unions?
> Is it because of something inherent to software development, or is it just that software development became a big job category in an environment that was skeptical of unions?
Unions are neither a good nor a bad thing. It's a price cartel, which is rent-seeking in its nature, but so are the employers. Thus effects of unions depend on competitiveness of the particular market. In low-paying markets they are clearly beneficial and counterbalance the monopsony.
Programmers exist in a competitive market tho. Average programmer has a great bargaining abilities and most people know it. If you are a senior you wont get much from union, it's just a hustle. If you are a junior/immigrant unions will harm you by raising the bar.
You reached reductio ad absurdum in two tiny steps. So unions are seeking rent by virtue of legal ownership of the motion physical bodies, just as property owners seek rent by virtue of ownership of real estate.
When life is working out for folks and they make a decent income, they tend not to complain or want to rock the boat so as not to risk things. Can’t think of anything that would risk ones income capability more than being seen by companies as a union organizer - retribution is illegal but can’t be enforced, so it is de facto legal. See: starbucks suddenly closing all the stores that decided to unionize.
People who own companies are not known for being nice but the best way to get the full force and fury of a billion dollars arrayed against you is to suggest unionization.
Unions benefit workers by giving them leverage through collective bargaining. For the US specifically, demand has been so astronomical for developers for the past couple of decades that most wouldn't have gained additional leverage from joining a union. Don't like your working conditions? Just job hop and get a pay increase as a bonus.
That calculus might change if demand for developers cools down as a long term trend but it's not going to be anytime soon.
I do think the high level of autodidacts makes it very different from anything else. It doesn't feel like a "trade", those involve building things with your hands. It's perhaps more similar to a "profession", like the much older ones of lawyers and doctors, but it hasn't developed the professional organization structure to go with it.
Disintermediation also makes a difference. It's possible - very unlikely for any one person, but possible, and keeps happening - to just bootstrap a product out of pure labour and very little capital. At which point they get to keep a lot of the returns. It doesn't at all fit a nineteenth-century economic model, so you can't apply the M word.
The "10x" phenomenon also makes a difference. Whether it's real or not, I think enough programmers believe it's real and want to be part of the 10x and somehow get a 10x reward. This is the exact opposite of a factory line or mass farmworker situation.
(there's lots of interesting business anthropology research on piecework vs hourly rate work, I believe)
It is because software developers are the capital and managerial class and they are the rich guy with the boot that stomps all the lower earning working class schleps , not the other way around.
Software developers _are_ mostly factory workers, it's just that their factories make software.
But titles aside - only some software developers are highly paid; some aren't. And we are not "special people" - that's just company propaganda. There are millions and millions of us around the world. And in most of our companies, there are a lot. And our employment conditions are not "special", they are like the other SW developers, and - guess what? Pretty much like those of most of the other non-manual-labor workers, even if the salaries differ by profession.
Most employers, and the media, do a lot to inculcate us with this belief in distancing ourselves from each other, emphasizing differences and supposed uniqueness, so that our interactions go through them; and that we not think of doing things - professionally and otherwise - by direct coordination and collaboration, but rather through the mediation of management.
But if there's anyone who has the capacity to imagine things operating differently than they do today, surely it must be us SW devs - if we don't limit our critical scrutiny to just the computers we work on but direct it also towards surrounding social structures.
So you’re sure it will stay that way, because you trust management to do the right thing? Even as you get older, life treats you harshly, or the economy goes down and suddenly you’re expected to work twenty extra hours?
> So you’re sure it will stay that way, because you trust management to do the right thing
Because they’ve given me reason to believe they will? But mostly because the law makes it really hard to let go of employees when your company is doing well enough to keep them.
You’re not wrong, but in Australia where I work only 12.5% of all workers are in unions. We have some moderately union-hostile legislation (strikes are hard to pull off lawfully) but nothing preventing union organisation in principle for most workers. So evidently it’s not only software developers who think this way.
So workers are prosecuted for withholding labor in negotiations with management, these are moderately union-hostile laws. I'm told Henry Clay Frick was somewhat disinclined in his opinion of unions as well.
One benefit the union members have over the non-union ones, though, is that you get insurance for legal counsel, for example. Other than that, union members don't have that many benefits, tbh. I still chose to be a member, because IMO it's the right thing to do.