[Manuel_D]

The workers aren't drones, they have the agency to choose another job. If a company is underpaying workers relative to the rest of the market, they'll struggle to hire and retain employees without the interference of a union.

[palmotea]

> The workers aren't drones, they have the agency to choose another job. If a company is underpaying workers relative to the rest of the market, they'll struggle to hire and retain employees without the interference of a union.

The problem is that all employers have certain common interests, and they are generally more organized and powerful than individual workers, which biases the market status-quo in their favor. The market doesn't fix that.

[mlrtime]

Do you think SWE at Meta should unionize?

[IshKebab]

This is the magical "perfect competition" view of the market that often doesn't match reality at all.

[Manuel_D]

What's keeping any one of these Id software developers from accepting a competing job offer elsewhere?

Yes, there are scenarios where employees are stripped of agency. E.g a factory owner taking and holding foreign worker's passports. But if you're going to allege that something is preventing these works from accepting competing offers, you have to offer evidence for that claim.

[Daishiman]

> What's keeping any one of these Id software developers from accepting a competing job offer elsewhere?

* Employer-bound health insurance in the US

* Industry blacklists to exclude uppity employees and union members

* Noncompetes and NDAs

* Extremely localized jobs and an ever-shrinking number of larger and larger conglomerates as employers

[Manuel_D]

> Employer-bound health insurance in the US

Benefits are part of an employees compensation package. A competing offer could have even better healthcare than Id.

> Industry blacklists to exclude uppity employees and union members.

This is illegal and the last time SV companies were found doing this the government punished them

Is there any evidence that this is happening to Id employees?

> Noncompetes

Illegal in CA where ID is based. NDAs don't prevent you from working at competitors, only from taking confidential info.

> Extremely localized jobs and an ever-shrinking number of larger and larger conglomerates as employers.

Id is located in the Bay Area, probably the place with the greatest concentration of software jobs in the country if not the world.

[Daishiman]

> Benefits are part of an employees compensation package. A competing offer could have even better healthcare than Id.

If a period of unemployment kicks you off an insurance program that's covering life-essential treatment for a loved one, there is no mechanism of "choosing freely" here; ex-employees don't have the option of covering health care themselves and there are no guarantees that the other employer's health care will cover existing treatments even if the coverage is better in theory.

> This is illegal and the last time SV companies were found doing this the government punished them

Every recruiter has spreadsheets of blacklisted employees, one of the reasons why companies frequently outsource staffing to outsides for plausible deniability.

> Illegal in CA where ID is based. NDAs don't prevent you from working at competitors, only from taking confidential info.

So illegal en CA but legal pretty much everywhere else, once again limiting you if you want to move because COL is too high in California and reducing the pool of real employment alternatives.

> Id is located in the Bay Area, probably the place with the greatest concentration of software jobs in the country if not the world.

Software jobs but not gaming jobs. California suffers from an artificial shortage of affordable housing due to insane tax laws and building restrictions. There's nothing free market about this.

[Manuel_D]

Id employees can apply for jobs while remaining employed at Id. You're writing as though Id employees must first quit their jobs before seeking a new one. And even if they do have a period of unemployment between jobs, COBRA continues to cover them for up to a year.

> Every recruiter has spreadsheets of blacklisted employees

If you're going to allege illegal anti-poaching agreements, you ought to provide evidence of those claims.

> So illegal en CA but legal pretty much everywhere else, once again limiting you if you want to move because COL is too high in California and reducing the pool of real employment alternatives.

Actually, I just checked this and in 2024 the FTC banned non competes nationwide.

> Software jobs but not gaming jobs. California suffers from an artificial shortage of affordable housing due to insane tax laws and building restrictions. There's nothing free market about this.

And? Id software developers are free to work non-gaming software jobs. A big part of the reason why game dev jobs offer less renumeration is because people are passionate about games and are willing to take a pay cut to work in the industry.

If an Id employee is not willing to work non-gaming software development jobs that's a restriction imposed by their own decisions, not by their employers.

People in this thread are comparing Id software developers to slavery. The fact that they'll have to go on COBRA in between jobs doesn't make this comparison to slavery any less absurd.

[linuxftw]

Remember when the tech companies got caught making deals not to poach each other's employees?

Maybe they can just start their own company. Well, you can't for the existing players to peer traffic with you if you need heavy network access.

[Manuel_D]

Do you have evidence that Id is being subject to some sort of no poach deal?

Nobody doubts that employers can curb worker's ability to accept competing offers. The question is whether there's actually any evidence backing up the claim that Id employees aren't free to leave.

[salawat]

Doesn't need it to justify unionizing. Unionizing is a right, and it was previously not exercised because there was no evidence of the will of the market to defraud or conspire against workers. It is now written plain for all to see that indeed, these types of arrangements are kept in board members back pockets. It is not their job to protect a companies interest in renumeration execs and shareholders. It is their job to get their share in spite of the management class's proven track records of the proclivity to engage in shenanigans and lies.

The fact you can't understand solidarity is your problem, not theirs.

[Manuel_D]

I'm not disputing that employees have right to try and form a union.

I'm asking people who are insisting that Id employees are not free to accept competing offers to back up those claims with evidence.

[jimbokun]

Corporations have been caught colluding to suppress wages by refusing to hire anyone working for one of the other companies.

How many of these collusions have not been brought to light?

[Manuel_D]

You're asking me to prove a negative. Bosses at other companies have been caught locking employees in factories and physically preventing them from leaving.

Can I say for certain that this didn't happen at Id? No, but anyone making that claim ought to actually provide evidence that it happened at Id, not simple point to some other company that engaged in this behavior.

[mlrtime]

Aren't there laws already against that? It's happened before but is it common, do we have evidence that it is prevalent in Software Engineering?

[buellerbueller]

WHat's keeping a company from providing fair wages, fair labor practices such that unions are unnecessary?

EDIT: I guess you can just downvote, sure, but why not engage?

[popalchemist]

You are correct. Unions do not exist to exploit employers, they exist precisely to make working conditions acceptable (livable) and no more, most of the time. There are outliers, like Police unions, which have ulterior motives, but on the whole it is a labor movement meant to prevent the abhorrent conditions to which capitalism naturally backslides, which we saw after the industrial revolution.

[jimbokun]

There are a lot of defacto cartels where all of the corporations determine a ceiling on wages they won't go over.

There was a big case with Apple and other Silicon Valley corporations were found to have colluded to not hire employees working for any of the other companies.

[Manuel_D]

> There was a big case with Apple and other Silicon Valley corporations were found to have colluded to not hire employees working for any of the other companies.

And there's some factories in Asia that confiscate foreign worker's passports.

Nobody is claiming that workers' ability to move jobs is never compromised by employees. The question is, is there any evidence to back up that Id employees are in this situation as commenters are claiming in this thread?

And it sure looks like the answer is "no", given that the best people can come up with is point to a decades old no-poaching agreement and speculate that something like that might be happening at Id.

[lenkite]

> the best people can come up with is point to a decades old no-poaching agreement

Why shouldn't Id employees be smart and protect themselves in a job market currently going bad for IT ?

Regarding the US in general, wage-fixing is still pretty common

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-nuclear-plant-op...

"In July 2025, a class action lawsuit was filed against Constellation Energy, Duke Energy, Pacific Gas & Electric and other U.S. nuclear plant operators, alleging that they conspired to suppress and coordinate worker pay for thousands of employees dating back to 2003. This lawsuit claims the companies acted together to keep wages low, which plaintiffs allege violates antitrust law"

"In a landmark verdict on April 14, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division notched its first-ever jury trial conviction for criminal wage-fixing under the Sherman Act in United States v. Eduardo Lopez in the District of Nevada. A home health care staffing executive, Eduardo (“Eddie”) Lopez, was found guilty of (1) conspiring with several competing home healthcare staffing agencies to fix the wages of home health nurses in the Las Vegas area, and..." https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/client-alerts/doj-secure...

"Hagens Berman: $200.2 Million in Settlements Reached in Lawsuit Accusing Red Meat Processing Industry of Wage-Fixing" https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240909921707/en/Hag...

[Manuel_D]

Is there any evidence that wage fixing is happening at Id?

Again, bosses kidnapping employees and holding them by force is extensively documented. But posting a bunch of stories to that effect doesn't matter for the topic at hand unless one of those is happening at Id.

[salawat]

Oh, yes, because we've never seen a case where large companies entered into no poach agreements to suppress worker wages, right?

Oh wait... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Quit the gaslighting.

[Manuel_D]

This collusion affected 8 companies, and stopped over a decade and a half ago. Is there any evidence that Id employees are being subject to this kind of no poach agreement?

[lenkite]

"Is there any evidence that Id employees are being subject to this kind of no poach agreement?"

Why should there be evidence ? They have a right to be pro-active and protect themselves from the C-suite.

[Manuel_D]

Because people replied to my statement that Id employees are free to accept competing jobs elsewhere claiming that that employees at Id don't have that ability. It sure looks like this claim is baseless.

[salawat]

This isn't a court of law. This is real life, bucko. You don't operate for your own protection on the good faith you think the rest of the world has for you, you plan on capabilities. What you call baseless, is you screaming into world that "you can't prove it, therefore it isn't". Wrong. We have eyes. We have seen the nature of the people we share the world with, and it tells us, that these bastards will happily collude if they think they won't get caught. They got caught doing it before when they had the benefit of good faith. It is 100% valid that the labor force integrate the learning with regards to capital's tendency to duplicity into their operating loop. I will no longer engage with attempts to convince the uninitiated to close their eyes and "just trust bro". Well over a decade being that guy and getting used.

If you're a junior, or someone trying to get into the field. I can't tell you the right path. But I can tell you, the people with the purse strings care only about that purse, and parting with as little of it's contents as possible, and getting as much out of you in the process of doing it. I can tell you I made the decision over 10 years ago to go the non-organized route. It worked. For a while. But at great personal cost medically, and likewise when I inevitably had to make the choice between becoming the better cog for the market, or being there for the people who matter most to me.

Don't delude yourselves. Organize. The people hiring you do. You must as well. Organize enough, and we as a society may finally recalibrate enough to achieve a new equilibrium that doesn't involve mulching each other for the sake of Mammon and Moloch.

[Manuel_D]

So to be clear: you have zero evidence that what you're alleging is actually happening at Id?