[redleader55]

I don't want to be "equalized". I'm happy to negotiate my own terms. In my experience the union leaders negotiate better terms for themselves than for the people they represent. The company prefers to have a good "shepherd" for the flock - the union leader.

If you look at where the good salaries are, you will not find them in France, Germany, Italy where the unions are strong, but the Bay Area, London, New York where unions are not really a thing.

[Rinzler89]

>If you look at where the good salaries are, you will not find them in France, Germany, Italy where the unions are strong, but the Bay Area, London, New York where unions are not really a thing.

True, but those "good salaries" are only but a fraction of the total salaries in the countries you mention. Methinks a country should prioritize the welfare and well being of the entire country's people and the average worker instead of focusing on the top 1% SW devs while letting everyone else sink.

Maybe keeping public services running for the bottom half of society is more important for society than creating the top SW companies in the world. After all you can't eat software, but we do need garbage men, doctors, pilots, sailors, nurses, handymen, architects, oil & gas and construction workers, farmers, car mechanics, barbers etc. a lot more to survive and run a modern society, than we need web devs to write yet another food delivery, ride sharing or crypto trading app designed just to skirt the laws and scam VCs and clueless investors while the interest rates are low.

If your toilets breaks, you still need an actual plumber to show up in person to fix it since he can't push an OTA fix remotely from home, otherwise you'll be rooting in your own shit no matter how advanced your knowledge of K8s and ML-Ops is. Who cares if you're a well paid SW dev in London, NYC or San Fran but you can't walk alone at night because you're surrounded by poor minimum wage struggling and homeless people on substances or mental illness from wealth inequality, lack of welfare/social care and societal collapse due to decades of poor political and financial policies designed only to favor the wealthy?

This is just my biased opinion, don't treat it as gospel ground truth.

[robocat]

I am interested in your parallel universe where software doesn't underpin every business... What line of business do you work in that doesn't need software for accounting, banking, invoicing, payroll, communications, yadda yadda.

Consumer software doesn't run the world. I think your negative examples of software scams and hucksters are consumer based.

> just to skirt the laws and scam VCs

VCs are not generally seen as victims!

> you still need an actual plumber to show up in person to fix

And that plumber depends directly or indirectly on plenty of software to get their job done, from the basics of getting paid to the more complex of sourcing parts. And they use a mobile phone, which is 99.9% software with a little bit of hardware.

[Rinzler89]

>VCs are not generally seen as victims!

I never said they were.

[throwaway7ahgb]

This is a heart felt message but has nothing to do with SWE pay. You don't make any suggestions here at all, am I supposed to interrupt this as everyone gets paid the same? If that is the case, say it.

If everyone is paid the same, who sets these salaries, unions? Then who sets the non union pay? Or does everyone work for the union or government?

[Rinzler89]

Where did I say everyone should get paid the same? All I said was that focusing on producing the world's top SW companies doesn't seem to produce the societies with the best quality of life, and that that should be the main focus of a healthy society IMO.

Yeah, what I said is not a solution to such problems, just an observation to the Original grandparent comment who tried to point out a few cities that have the best SW compensation as if that should be the end goal for every country.

[bjornsing]

So we started out with the idea that unions are good for software developers, and now it’s about how you can’t eat software anyway and society should really value someone else? Yeah I get it…

[Rinzler89]

No, I was just pointing out that what London, NYC, SF, are doing might not be the best for everyone even if they host the topo SW companies in the world.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> New York where unions are not really a thing.

I live in NY, and I can tell you that unions are very much a “thing,” hereabouts.

[throwaway7ahgb]

Same here, and unions are not much farther from the old school organized crime gangs.

The unions in NYC protect the union. They care about little else.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> The unions in NYC protect the union. They care about little else.

That's their fiat. They're supposed to be like that.

I'm really hoping that unions are learning a bit of humility from the last few years. We'll see.

Japan (and Germany, I hear), has unions that are stakeholders (and, often board members) of corporations. They seem to work quite well, and are very powerful.

[9dev]

Particularly in Germany, unions are quite literally unions of workers that band together, not menacing cartels. By law, companies must not interfere with workers organising themselves in a Betriebsrat, basically a company-internal union, which (as you mentioned) by mere forming becomes a stakeholder and needs to be involved in certain decisions.

This doesn’t automatically mean you have a mandatory tariff for everyone, just that there is an organisation in your workplace that you can turn to, which will have your interests in mind, without you having to be a member. They can protect you from overreaching managers, baseless accusations, or unwarranted layoffs. And of course, they usually negotiate on behalf of the entire staff, especially on HR topics.

While this isn’t always working perfectly, it’s still a big achievement in terms of equality and worker rights.

It’s unfortunate, I think, that the US has such an awful history in terms of unions. There are far more nuances than discussions on HN make it seem, and virtually nobody looses if employees have strong protections against their employers.

[einpoklum]

> I don't want to be "equalized".

You already are - by your employer. Mostly equalized at the absolute bottom of every situation where you disagree with your superiors or need to rely on the company for something.

> I'm happy to negotiate my own terms.

And your employer is even happier for you to believe you are actually negotiating your own terms.

> In my experience the union leaders negotiate better terms for themselves than for the people they represent.

That is certainly a potential problem. But think about the distribution of status, benefits and compensation of owners, managers, and employees - that's even more extreme, and prevalent, than misdeeds by union leaders.

This sounds like a bit of a "democracy can have corruption so let's support the monarchy" kind of an argument.

> The company prefers to have a good "shepherd" for the flock - the union leader.

What companies prefer is to shepherd the flock themselves. Failing that, getting a collaborative shepherd. The challenge in unionization is disrupting the shepherding and allowing for conscious collective reflection and action.

> in France, Germany, Italy where the unions are strong, but the Bay Area, London, New York where unions are not really a thing.

The US is the center of the major world empire right now, and is not really comparable with most other places. However, even if you took the US - it's pretty much a hellscape, socially. Large tech companies are swimming in their ill-gotten gains while a huge number of people are homeless, many can only access contaminated water, students are in massive debt, infrastructure is in poor repair, public facilities and systems are under-developed...

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[StefanBatory]

Exactly this. Union members, to an fair extent, are leeching on the back of other, productive employees.