Awesome to see something like this on HN. As we keep working for less pay, more hours, the constant threat of layoffs, and business leaders frothing at the mouth to replace us all with AI, it's important to remember that we aren't powerless as workers. It's also important to remember that your relationship to the higher-ups is adversarial. They want to get as much productivity out of you for as little pay as possible. It's not because they're evil, it's just good business. Organizing helps protect us as things get worse.
I see a lot of my colleagues resigned to the reality we live in and just hoping they get lucky enough to come out on the right side of the meat grinder by making a few bucks at a startup. I've worked in a couple industries, and tech workers seem to lack solidarity in a way I haven't seen elsewhere. I survived three rounds of layoffs at a startup, and every time the attitude among some of my colleagues was that we "trimmed the fat." I somewhat agreed and got caught up in that culture until I got picked up in the fourth round of layoffs at a time when I felt I was doing my best work. We need each other as workers to get through a future that looks gloomy for technology developers. As the saying goes: "united we bargain, divided we beg." A better world is possible!
> It's not because they're evil, it's just good business
Almost everything I have ever heard described as "good business" is pretty evil
You never hear "Oh we should give everyone a raise, that's just good business"
It's always stuff like "we put 10000 orphans through a meat grinder to make 10 cents, it wasn't personal it was just good business"
Edit: of course that is an exaggeration
But more realistic examples include things like "we laid off 200 people the week before Christmas so we hit our targets for the next year. Not personal, just good business"
Frankly, maybe if companies need to make such "good business" tradeoffs frequently, it shows that the people running them aren't actually good at business in the first place
> You never hear "Oh we should give everyone a raise, that's just good business"
Lots of big tech companies give people raises automatically when they think they're too underpaid.
> Frankly, maybe if companies need to make such "good business" tradeoffs frequently, it shows that the people running them aren't actually good at business in the first place
I really, really don't get this. Sometimes companies overhire. Sometimes it's even their own fault that they've overhired.
Either way, clearly IT HAPPENS and sometimes companies will need to lay off workers when it becomes clear they're not useful enough to justify their pay.
It's not inherently a reflection on the workers or the company; most of the time it's a reflection of interest rates and nothing more.
> most of the time it's a reflection of interest rates and nothing more
Yeah that's basically what I'm saying
Unsustainably over-hiring to take advantage of low interest rates is viewed as a smart business decision. It may actually be a smart business decision, but it is still evil
Startups are risky and unionizing won't force them to keep you employed. In fact, it will create an environment of less startups and more large companies with less choices for the employee.
Union heavy countries like Sweden have almost no startup scene and wages are normalized (ie: almost all the same across white collar industries).
> They want to get as much productivity out of you for as little pay as possible
It’s only adversarial because you want to get as much pay as possible out of them for as little productivity as possible.
> I somewhat agreed and got caught up in that culture until I got picked up in the fourth round of layoffs at a time when I felt I was doing my best work.
> It’s only adversarial because you want to get as much pay as possible out of them for as little productivity as possible.
And the employer wants to pay the employee as little as possible for as much productivity as possible.
In a perfect world with perfect information and rational actors on a level playing field, this is great: we expect supply and demand to converge, this is econ 101.
But it's not a perfect playing field, one side is coercive, holds most/all the cards, calls all the shots, treats people with lives and experiences as "resources", and seeks profit over all other objective functions. This is class dynamics 101.
You get paid X. You deliver Y value. The proportion is X / Y. Sometimes that proportion is very high, sometimes it is very low. Sometimes it is negative. Sometimes you get a divide by zero error.
And again, the questions.
What specific proportion do you think is fair? And how do you calculate the value you provide?
Capitalism is explicitly not about that. Holy shit this is insane that you think that’s how capitalism works on a website that’s literally about venture capital. What the fuck.
I dunno, he's asking a really basic question that should be trivial to answer. When I see a basic, level-setting question like this go unanswered, it starts to seem like the side refusing to answer is the one acting in bad faith, not the side asking the question
The answer is 100%. This brings us to the start point of the real conversation this person is trying to have, which likely centers on the nature of employment, the importance of Job Creators, and/or the infallibility of markets.
But that's not a valid answer? It seems like you're sidestepping the question by moving the goalposts and redefining terms.
The reality is that there will always be a gap between "what a company is willing to pay you for your work" and "what your contribution to the whole earns the company", and that's... fine? The whole is often greater than the parts, and this difference contributes to that gap. The gap also needs to provide for the commons of the company: workspaces, licenses, equipment, interest/loan repayments, etc.
This mostly just a fleshing out of the `X` and `Y` quantities mentioned by the ancestor. If you don't think the whole is worth that much more than the parts, then presumably you should seek employment at a company that offers you a larger absolute `X`, a larger relative `X / Y`, or (ideally) both. If no such company exists, you could attempt to start one of your own? That would be the ultimate vote of confidence that such a thing is even possible, right?
I suspect the reason why such companies do not exist is because that's actually much harder to accomplish than you're making it out to be.
100% seems delusional to me because you're saying that the company deserves no profit for doing the work of providing you customers to provide value for?
It also seems to ignore the fact that some of the value you're creating is used to pay for the work that enables your value creation. Think about payroll processing, benefits administration, hiring, etc. etc. Those roles provide value as well but don't directly bring in money.
Isn't that part of the tradeoff of working for a company that they take a "fee" for giving you dependable work? You can approach 100% value-capture by working for yourself but there are downsides there as well.
I assumed that each of these entities would also earn 100% of their contribution to the value created. How you split up the credit is a difficult problem. (As many developers will note, there is no such thing as a 'cost center'; all labor contributes to the outcome.)
However, a bigger problem in the current state is the existence of parties whose only real role is funding, but who receive an outsized portion of the reward.
You’ve just found a roundabout way to repeat the idea that you don’t like that someone else is getting what you believe to be an unfairly large piece of the pie.
Because currently in the world today, the owner of the business is earning 100% of the value they provide as is the developer as is the bookkeeper.
You just don’t agree with each person’s view of the value they create and don’t have a way to determine the actual value they create.
So we’re back where we started.
> However, a bigger problem in the current state is the existence of parties whose only real role is funding, but who receive an outsized portion of the reward.
Isn’t the funder getting earning 100% of the value they create (just like you want them to) by providing capital? If not, how do you prove otherwise?
I am an engineering manager for a large team of developers. Part of my job is to estimate the cost and potential revenue of big projects. I have a spreadsheet of everyone's salaries (including bonus compensation, other perks).
I've done the math at my own company: average developer salary is approximately $100k. Our largest teams have 10 developers, so about $1M in labor costs. These teams work on projects that bring the company $10M every year.
We literally earn $1,000,000 for every $100,000 developer salary. Developers are some of the most productive workers in the world, but only keep 10-20% of the fruits of their own labor.
I am shocked that developers haven't figured this out. Almost all of the value they create goes into the pockets of their CEO.
I'm sure many of us have figured this out, it's just that there's no alternative for most.
I live in Europe and we are all unionized and I hate to break it to you but we're still creating much more value than we earn for someone else. Our work conditions may be significantly better - I work 40h/week with unlimited vacation (within reason ofc) and sick days - yet still burnout happens frequently and necessitates costly rehabilitation trajectories.
We deal with the consequences better, and I'm grateful for the conditions here, they may well be much worse elsewhere, but the core issues remain. Humans aren't built to work mentally straining jobs for 8 or more hours per day, and the fruit baskets and vacations only do so much. I believe a four day work week would help some of it.
Burnout is caused by your body running on adrenaline and cortisol for too long as you’re pushing past what is sustainable. Eventually your body says - enough! And it forces you to stop.
The _symptom_ of burnout are as you describe: essentially you no long see the point of what you’re doing.
Speculatively, I believe the drop in motivation is your body’s way of stopping you pushing it any further. It’s a defence mechanism.
Hm I see. You have a point that the causality is not necessarily how I described. But I am not convinced it is the opposite.
What causes the workplace to make you have high adrenaline and cortisol for too long? Stress is perceived by the body as a threat and it subsidizes when the body perceives that the threat is overcome. If we exert ourselves for a while but then we have a good outcome and we celebrate with our colleagues, we will have dopamine and oxytocin levels rise and adrenaline and cortisol subsidize. Something one might say makes the exertion meaningful.
So I hear what you're saying but I think we're both describing the same thing from two perspectives and not actually different causality directions. I described the subjective interpretation and you described the biochemical process underlying it.
There's no need to be snarky. The values of things can most definitely be objectively measured, otherwise there would be no transactions. Objective is not absolute, the objective evaluation might change when the agents involved have new information.
I also don't thing it contentious that the stockholders pocket some of the results of the workers labor. That is the whole point of employing people isn't it?
Though you'll need to deduct a lot of SG&A, etc. overheads from that as well, and it often looks far worse.
Big Tech companies (ie ones close to monopolies) still extract a ton of net cash flow that ends up going to investors and top management, though you could then ask why those monopolies extract cash from their customers as well, etc.
My worry with tech unionization is that generally it slows productivity increases and change. I get why bus drivers, etc. in stable systems should organize and could do so without adversely affecting system performance, but in tech/startups, I don't think those companies would exist in unionized form for very long before being put out of business.
Now they're just saddled with too much bureaucracy and politics, and that's already led most of them to underperform, at least on an innovation basis.
> My worry with tech unionization is that generally it slows productivity increases and change.
Do you have examples?
> Now they're just saddled with too much bureaucracy and politics, and that's already led most of them to underperform, at least on an innovation basis.
Yea, it's more complicated than that, but in the US context unionization (like in the automotive and steel industries) was shown to slow innovation. [1]
The counter to this is that Europe actually has better outcomes because it takes a more collaborative approach vs. the adversarial approach in the US, and this better approach has shown to improve some outcomes.
The linked paper is strongly biased towards the ownership class--and the think tank is labeled "libertarian-conservative" on wikipedia, so I'm skeptical of the conclusions.
Yea, almost anyone in the US asking about the productivity implications of unionization will be coming from the ownership class, as US unions don't see that as their problem vs. building worker power.
I couldn't find a paper about US unions increasing productivity. Can you?
Fair. And I didn't look for other papers. If the discussion is simply "unions decrease productivity" however that's defined, that may be true. But by how much? Is that a problem? To whom?
I suspect unionization is better for more people overall.
Interesting approach. Did you ever try to include other factors into the model ? Such as :
* cost of sales (and crm, and billing)
* cost of infra
* taxes (on income and profits)
* taxes (on salary)
* cost per employee (office, PC, software licenses)
* cost of loans needed for the investment
Would be curious to see how big the ratio remains.
The alternative is to start your own company or start consulting. I've been doing this for over a decade and make great money compared to a salaried employee.
Doing this has also made me realize that development is only a small part of the overall process.
This is overly simplistic. I don’t fault you for it, but it shows a lack of understanding how a business functions.
There is a lot of overhead that goes into running a business, as others have mentioned. Taxes. Rent. Utilities. Licenses. Certifications. HR, testers, project managers, product managers, people managers, directors, marketing, customer service, sales, C suite, and on and on.
I know right now you might be saying “those people don’t even do anything! Developers are the only people making the damn product!”. Again, a business is kind of like a product of its own. It takes many moving parts to take a usable product and get it to market, fight off competition, work with government for regulations (or keep from getting regulated), find and get customers, etc.
Once you try and “go it alone” you will realize that creating the product is only one small part of making a functional and profitable business.
I run a small business. I don’t use half of those roles I mentioned and there is still a lot of overhead. It is very easy to underestimate the amount of extra work involved.
And yet you still turn a profit at the end of the day, i.e., money that's not going to 'overhead'. Let's not kid ourselves. Your interest as the owner is to maximize that profit and minimize expenses, and our interest as workers is to maximize our wage and minimize your profit.
> Your interest as the owner is to maximize that profit and minimize expenses, and our interest as workers is to maximize our wage and minimize your profit.
Business owners are also responsible for ensuring their employees (and payroll taxes) are paid whenever revenue dips into the "L" part of "P&L".
Wise owners ensure some portion of profit is retained such that temporary market adversity does not immediately result in terminating their employees.
People who have never had these concerns make sweeping statements such as the one quoted.
As it should be. I am not begrudging anyone of that. As a matter of fact, I often mentor employees on treating their career as a business, and build it accordingly. Just like a strong business, you should be selling your services for as much as reasonable, and if your employer is not paying the appropriate price then find another “buyer”.
To maximize the price you can sell your ‘product’ (you), you should be making career decisions that strengthen your offering. This can be taken too far (those that only look for promotions at the expense of real work), but it can be done ethically very easily.
No, this is just the (insane) status quo. Ideally, however, businesses exist to carry out a mission (beyond making money). Part of this mission is supporting the livelihoods of employees; part of it is giving a return to investors; part of should be some social net good (maybe within a larger societal context, if not unilaterally). Much as "maximizing" the price at which you sell yourself (ick) often ends in workaholism, broken personal relationships, unhealthy relationships to material goods, and a generally deleterious existence as the opposite of a happy, upstanding, and well-loved member of society, "maximizing shareholder value" usually ends in a business that is either a hated monopoly or a bankrupt shell (often both, in that order). In both cases, hyperfocus has lead to the loss of the entire reason for pursuing the venture in the first place.
Profit is just a KPI for something else that you're supposed to be doing (and often a bad one, depending on what that something else is).
> Ideally, however, businesses exist to carry out a mission (beyond making money).
I mean, sure, but the defining difference between a business and a nonprofit is making money.
It's important for companies to provide value to society but the way we measure that is by how much they earn. Despite several hundred years of people trying to come up with better ways to do this, this is the only one that seems to work.
Non-profit organizations are often colloquially called "non-profit businesses" in recognition of the fact that they are organized and operate as any other business would - in developing business plans, filing with the IRS, hiring employees, minding balance sheets, etc - except in ways related to their purposely not seeking a profit (though revenue is another matter).
>but the way we measure that is by how much they earn
Again, it's a flawed heuristic. Military contracting is wildly profitable. Value to society is questionable.
>this is the only one that seems to work.
Analysis of the subtle successes of social democracies and "Gross National Happiness" are just two examples that put the lie to this myth.
> Again, it's a flawed heuristic. Military contracting is wildly profitable. Value to society is questionable.
It's not questionable at all but if you don't already see that I'm not interested in arguing it with you.
> Analysis of the subtle successes of social democracies and "Gross National Happiness" are just two examples that put the lie to this myth.
GNH is cope from the Dragon King of Bhutan to justify the poverty and ethnic cleansing of his nation in the international community. The Nordic countries all have very high per-capita GDP.
If you wanna call my claim a myth, citing a few metrics which correlate really well with GDP is not very convincing.
Militaries exist expressly to destroy (enemy) societies. Even if you agree with the reason for a war, that fact doesn't change. So "preservation" of one society (if becoming beholden to a MIC doesn't change that society) versus the destruction of another. Questionable value.
>GNH is cope from the Dragon King of Bhutan to justify the poverty and ethnic cleansing of his nation in the international community.
The commencement of measuring GNH coincided with marked increases in Bhutanese living standards by traditional measures. Nordic countries have roughly the same GDP per capita as the US. Countries like Japan and France feature lower GDP per capita and, while not traditionally considered social democracies, feature comparable approaches to social welfare, income equality, etc.
Free-Market Capitalism as the only way, or even best way, to prosperity is indeed a myth. Even at its best or most successful, it has to be tempered with robust social policy and economic controls, lest people fall to excess and the economy itself burn out. That's called, "Late-Stage Capitalism", and you'd best start believing, because we're in it.
That's the standard conversation line that sounds oh-so optimistic but it's not actually true, is it?
As soon as you need to raise money, or as soon as you need to compete, the system will either beat you into submission or you'll get out-competed by companies that don't concern themselves with any missions other than making the maximum amount of money possible.
The most ruthless, dirtiest, immoral players can cut the most corners, grease the most political wheels and offer products and services at the lowest prices.
This is true, and what Machiavelli was talking about in his book The Prince. He is not talking about HOW to be an asshole ruler, he was talking about what other asshole rulers WILL DO, and how you will need to deal with that (as a ruler that does not wish to be a tyrant).
While it certainly reads satirical, in the sense that someone writing a book like this now would come off comically evil, there is nothing to suggest it was a satire. That's just a reddit thing that's been trending, and largely put forward by one historian a long time ago.
There's plenty of reason to think he wrote this book earnestly to boost his own political standing with the Medici family. It was not written for the common man, it was written as a resumé for political leaders to peruse. However, he distanced himself from the book in his later work.
I appreciate your frankness, and I am not an idealist who is proposing that the market 'should' be this way or that way for purely moral reasons. But the topic at hand is unionization. An aspect you neglect in this post is that another way to raise wages (or 'total compensation') is via collective bargaining. If tech workers really do care, and have a collective interest, and are able to overcome countervailing forces, this is an inevitability. No longer will the ball be purely in your court as an employer to solely determine the value of labor.
I don't agree that the worker's interest is or should be in minimizing company profit - this is a very zero sum approach that doesn't really cover companies that aren't stagnant or dying.
I agree with your general point that a business CAN increase profit by reducing costs, including by reducing employee compensation (and there are lots of shortsighted, greedy people out there) but increasing revenue instead is often much more significant and, in theory, can increase both employee take home and company profit.
A business is a mechanism to turn labor and other resources into revenue and often aligns with paying for more expensive talent in order to provide more valuable revenue. Businesses that are failing or stagnant can't grow revenue anymore and have to cut costs instead.
I don't think the imbalance between workers and companies is in a zero sum, adversarial relationship. I think the imbalance is in who gets to decide what to grow and what to cut (which is one place where collective bargaining helps a great deal).
The aim of the worker is not usually to kill the firm, I assumed that went without saying, as that would ultimately 'minimize' their wages. But the reason to work in a society where one needs money is to receive a wage, as maximal as possible. These incentives will always contradict whatever real but necessary need there is for 'genuine interest' or 'social tendencies'. Constantly businesses attempt to harness this value, (which is the source of revolutions in productivity beyond the daily rote labor) through trying to present the relationship as anything but transactional. But as their interest in this value is ultimately a monetary interest, what the worker returns to them will be done on a transactional basis. An inhuman force rules over all.
> Your interest as the owner is to maximize that profit and minimize expenses, and our interest as workers is to maximize our wage and minimize your profit.
Is it? I know a handful of small business owners, and generally their interest is running their business well and keeping their customers happy. Sure, they want to be profitable, but profit isn't their primary motivator.
They may have a moral sentiment and so too do employees - but the market is the ultimate condition for any moral sentiment to survive. You have no company, you no longer 'satisfy' customers. I am not referring to a moral idea, but a cold reality of business.
Before maximizing wages and minimizing profit, your interest as workers is to assure that the owner is provided with enough financial motivation to both stay in business and not find substitute employees or solutions for the work that you do.
It varies greatly per company and industry. You are talking about Net Margin and it can vary a lot.
A company like google has a 28% net margin. That means that after paying all expenses for employees and rent and everything, they have 28% left over from revenue as profit. This is very good.
Amazon (being a hybrid retailer/tech company) has 9.29% net margin.
Target has a net margin of 3.84%.
Believe it or not, many public companies have a negative net margin, meaning they spend more than they bring in. Lyft had a negative net margin until just this year. A few years ago, they had a negative net margin of -70%! That means if someone didn’t keep putting money into the company they would have “ceased as a going concern”, as they say. Their most recent year they had a 0.39% net margin. Go Lyft!
Okay, that seems easy enough and affordable with most tech salaries.
> hire the developers for $200,000
And you've just applied an unspoken filter. What founder can afford paying someone $200k a year, let alone multiple people? So that means you need to either be filthy rich already or to get investors - who will likely have very strong opinions about whether you should be paying devs double their market rate even if you still make a profit.
Not to mention that this assumes "your own company" can earn $1,000,000 for every developer it employs. Because "your own company" likely has a completely different value proposition, different customers and different tech.
The profit (read: surplus value not paid out to employees) of a company doesn't directly translate to market success or competiveness, but it can affect factors that do (e.g. availability of investments, bank loans, etc). It's not necessary to exploit your workers to operate a sustainable business, it's just very difficult to compete with companies that do because they can tap into those profits to cut you off (e.g. by cutting prices below cost) or leapfrog you (e.g. by acquisitions or hiring more people).
The existence of a company willing to pay its employees 2x the market rate doesn't impact the ability of other companies to hire enough sufficiently talented people at or below market rate to squash that company if it is small enough. "We live in a society" - or in a market in this case. The market wasn't created yesterday so if you join it today, you're starting at a disadvantage, not an equal level playing field.
It is funny when middle class salaried employees notice the same thing that every minimum wage worker knows intuitively, but that’s part of how this system remains stable is a lack of awareness.
This is how the monetary system works. While your math is inaccurate in terms of the spirit of what it is attempting to show, correcting for that, its still the way of the world until money is no longer a thing.
No. Respectfully, you don't understand how money works and the proposal of vaguely applied ten cent terms can't make up for that. Ironically, this means that you also don't understand socialism.
Capitalism is simply the innate nature and structure of the monetary system. The maintenance of the properties of money require capitalism. Otherwise, you will begin to not have money. No matter what word that you use for it. I'm not saying that this is a good thing. It's just a concrete thing.
The more socialism that you apply, especially in terms of shelf goods, the less actual money that you have. Due to how prices will react, what you begin to have is something akin to allotted credits or even just de facto allotted goods. The former which necessarily implies price controls. The only question then is how much food each person will be allotted.
Tell me which companies, ahem, I mean "socialist countries" aim to maximize free GDP allotment (in this case for food) to each individual citizen instead of minimize it to the lowest possible level? Consider a hypothetical wherein this socialist country has 300 million people.
The negatives of capitalism are not because of capitalism. They are because of the structural nature of money, which only maintains value roughly relative to the degree to which a large amount of people don't have it.
Smart countries attempt to maximize socialist benefits without affecting their currency value, in order to control and promote social stability to the best of their ability. But this generally excludes socialism for common goods, or else the characteristics of money begin to change.
If every single person paid to work on AWS leaves the company overnight, what happens to the value of AWS? Sure, Amazon could eventually hire enough people to replace those who left and maybe even keep AWS running and develop new features but it would be a catrastrophic loss of value and take a long time (and a huge investment) to recover.
You don't create value by having capital either. Labor converts capital into value. Labor can also transform capital (e.g. produce code which can then be used to provide a service for money). Plenty of people have "ideas" but ideas are worthless in a vacuum. If you pay someone to turn your ideas into capital you can use to generate value with cheap labor, your idea didn't become valuable by itself, you literally paid for labor to refine your capital to become better at generating value - you may legally own that refined capital the same way you owned the initial capital but the transformation had nothing to do with you other than your means to pay someone to perform it for you. Your money didn't create value, it merely facilitated the transformation of your capital and the creation of value. Your individual ownership of that capital is entirely unnecessary in this.
The tech, knowledge, software, etc of a company is a multiplier for the value labor can produce. It still requires labor to produce that value. It also requires labor to maintain that multiplier, much like literal machines require maintenance. The industrial era analogy still holds true (and arguably even more so given how specialized individual jobs can become).
The total cost of employment is generally not an order of magnitude more than salaries. Wages are the biggest cost factor in most companies, especially in companies built on knowledge work (e.g. software). The biggest employee expenses (though usually defined in terms of easily obtainable bonuses and often with severance packages other employees don't have access to) are CEO and other CxO-level positions. This isn't because of a natural value of these positions to the company, this is almost entirely the result of years of advocacy to investors and boards promoting the idea that these positions should be paid several orders of magnitude more than everyone else with very little factual evidence to support that idea - it's pure ideology and it's fairly recent.
The overheads are irrelevant for the general point, too. Corporations need to make a profit to function. Corporations don't need to siphon that profit almost exclusively into CxO-level benefits and shareholder dividends. You're right to argue that if a company makes $1,000,000 per $100,000 employee, that doesn't mean it makes $900,000 in profit per employee. But even if the operating costs are so high it only makes $100,000 profit per employee - that's still money left on the table (which the individual employee has no leverage to demand a fair share of).
Well if it's that simple go ahead and start a company, generate $1M per employee and pay everybody their fair share.
If you're right you'll get the top 0.1% talent in that market, no question.
This write up sounds like it describes a very particular subset of companies. If you only want to work at the flashy unicorns in downtown San Francisco, you are signing yourself up for exploitation.
Like any career, if you get off the beaten path there are plenty of pretty okay jobs out there. Especially if you have a marketable skill. This is software, if you have a brain and functional hands - you already own the means of production!
I absolutely support unions - but you're going to personally be better off changing companies and working your career ladder and finding the spot for you than sticking around at an exploitative company just because they have a union.
> This write up sounds like it describes a very particular subset of companies
Indeed.
80 hours a week (or even 60): Never had to deal with that in over a decade across 3 jobs. In fact, I've never had to work a weekend (and if I did, it was either to fix my own screwup, or because I intentionally slacked off during the week and needed to make up for it).
Slack/email off work hours? Just ask up front in the interview: "I turn off my laptop at the end of my work day, and don't install any work related items on the phone. Is that OK?"
On call? Lots of jobs that either don't involve running an online/web service, or if it does is for some internal company tool where the cost of it being down is low. I've never had on call. However, I did interview at places that did, so the questions to ask in the interview:
"What is the on-call rotation look like?" Typically it's one week per person, rotated by the number of people in the team. Team has 4 people? That's once every 4 weeks (too much for me).
"How often are people called during on-call?" I interviewed in one place where they got 2 calls out of work hours in the whole year. I can live with that.
"What's the process of evaluating those calls?" Do they just expect you to take care of it and move on, or do they have a process to analyze and prevent it from happening again? Some teams move too fast and there will always be calls - they don't want the hit in fixing things.
Incredible idealism. If you work in infrastructure, even development, there's no such thing as shutting down at the end of the day or weekends. 'You never know' if someone senior gets agitated off hours because something is broken, and is expecting a big group on a zoom call
I do work in infrastructure and never had to work out of working hours unless I was oncall. Our on-call rotation is 12h a day for a week, because we have an oversea team taking over. I get oncall every 5 weeks.
You can absolutely find places with good working condition and with a good salary
In New York I am finding the expectations getting higher and the salaries stagnating, to the point that I'm considering taking the plunge into consulting.
There's not a lot of infrastructure job talk on HN as everyone is a software developer or academic type.
A union doesn't have to be "workers for company X employees". It can be "web developers union" or similar - this is how the trades organize (see the pipefitters, and IBEW for some examples).
Neat thing about this type of organizing is that the union provides training and standardization paths. Both of those make moving between jobs easier.
They can also provide a standardized way of differentiating employee levels (e.g. union sets the standards for what a jr, sr, or whatever is). I'm not sure if that is good or not in tech, but it is a possiblility - and it's something that would definitely help employers too: rather than each company having to test each potential employee, a union certified X dev will have a certain skillset. Yes some X devs will be better than others, we're talking about humans here, but the minimum bars can be defined and the whole hiring process can become easier and more efficient.
Theres some interesting compensation challenges to get the idea of unionization more accepted in tech tho: stock based compensation and bonuses can get really tricky - something that I suspect is the real reason unions don't catch on more in tech.
> something that I suspect is the real reason unions don't catch on more in tech.
I think a bigger issue is the difficulty of measuring correctness and quantity of individual output.
For a classic-style of union in manufacturing, the standardized widgets coming off an assembly line mean it's easier to determine which workers are being fired for actual-cause, versus the ones who need to be protected by the union because it's a kind of employer retaliation or stealth-downsizing.
An awful lot of unions exist in spaces where "compare the widget to the template" is an impossibility. Some examples:
SAE standardizes the labor cost for a given task, although an individual mechanic may go faster and slower than the proscribed hours. The same mechanaic will have different times for multiple instances of the same task based on details of the job.
Police unions effectively require arbitration on an employee by employee basis, since police work is so highly situationally dependent.
Creative unions like SAG and screewriters guild often don't have the notion of measuring quality of output. They exist to ensure various workplace rules (safety, breaks, sane environment, etc) and minimum compensation standards are followed.
The union is not a template of how to be an assembly line worker - its a way to equalize the power between an employer and employees. The specifics of how one union negotiates its collective bargain don't dictate what a union for an entirely different group of people will negotiate.
> It can be "web developers union" or similar - this is how the trades organize (see the pipefitters, and IBEW for some examples).
This is also how unions exist in most of the rest of the world as well. We take it for granted how weird the US labor recognition process is.
Most other countries following a long history of craft unionism. But in the US the laws were crystalized during a time of active conflict between traditional craft unions and socialist-inspired "industrial" unions. So all of the principles of the NLRB are this weird set of dated compromises.
I quite like the idea of a trade union or accreditation board for SWE. The idea that we all work by a shared set of standards and terminology is appealing.
Sounds like a group that captures credentialing in the industry and then winds up using it to push their own flawed ideology on the entire industry. Because who else would actually be interested in being part of such a board.
Civil, mechanical, electrical, and most other engineering disciplines have an accreditation board. I don't think they are pushing a "flawed" ideology in those disciplines. At least I don't see civil engineers constantly questioning why they would do load modeling for a bridge, like SWE's constantly question the value of unit testing.
Yeah and what are the numbers on how many employed engineers hold that accreditation? Just because it exists doesn't mean it's used.
I know for a fact that aerospace, electrical, and mechanical engineers working on designing rockets, nuclear reactors, space capsules, and electric charging infrastructure do not need this credential. And so most of them do not have it.
Consistent educational standards leads to a common shared understanding of what knowledge and training your engineering colleagues have. This also makes it easier right off the bat for an employer to know what a "junior" engineer is - and leads to more consistent experience levels afterwards.
And you didn't quite mix it up, a degree from an ABET accredited school is required to get your professional engineering certification, which is often required in cases where engineering designs carry legal liability.
I think there's still a lot of inconsistency and judgement that happens for gauging whether someone is junior and for what skills they might have. Many software engineers don't have CS degrees at all and even more have ones from different countries.
I am unable to find concrete numbers on this, but I would bet that the majority of employed engineers in the US do not carry a professional engineering certification.
I don't argue with your point regarding how many engineers have their PE. I don't have mine.
My point is that accreditation boards and trade unions can help set standard minimums of what an engineer (or trades person) will know going into a job. Of course employers can ignore them, but in general those standards help bring consistent expectations to a given trade.
And yet, that's what we do with CoderPad, Leetcode, Karat, etc.
Yes, of course you should still interview them afterwards, I'm sure that's what credentialed professions do as well. My point is just to have the Leetcode portion be done once rather than for every company's interview.
I don't trust someone else, especially some credentialing body to administer leetcode style questions. I'm still going to want to have a candidate prove they can actually write code.
Do you perform interviews on potential doctors or lawyers you may choose to use? If you trust credentialing bodies for such important services why the distrust for something non-lifethreatening like an employee?
A second opinion comes after services are rendered. I don't think you put your doctor through a ringer like an employment candidate, was the point I was making.
No I do though, although the context is of course different since I don't know a bunch about medicine.
I ask a ton of questions and I've found that good doctors a) welcome the questions and b) do a good job of explaining. If q doctor doesn't really give me good answers then I'll go elsewhere. A lot of doctors appointments are ahead of some bigger procedure or an ongoing relationship, so the first meeting definitely is evaluative for me.
Maybe you can ask them domain-specific questions more relevant to the actual position you’re hiring them for? System design? Pair programming session? Debug a code sample? Present a solution for a home coding assignment?
Anyway, many companies are outsourcing phone screens now to services such as Karat, where Kiwi contractor engineers provide 24/7 interview availability. Yet those interviews cannot be transferred from company to prospective Karat-using company. So you get the worst of all worlds.
Contracting out interviewing is nuts. IDK how a company can think that the level of validation you get in a coding interview is necessary and also think that it can be outsourced to someone else. They seem completely at odds with each other. I assume they're just cargo culting what other companies do though.
I don't think memorizing trivia is a useful signal for a job, which is what a lot of "domain expertise" looks like in interviews. If you're going to write software and solve problems for a job then you should be able to sit down and solve some medium difficulty coding problems. It's not that hard. Personally I'd much rather do that than a take-home coding assignment.
The number of people out there working as engineers who can't write basic code is too high to not check.
To be fair it’s just the phone screens, but this is the world we’re living in. Eventually someone will build another Triplebyte with AI evaluators and so on and it might actually catch on.
To go back full circle, if you get a decent credentialing system then people who can code can simply pass a test once (let’s say every 5-10 years) and be done with it instead of every single time they interview. DRY!
If it existed then we'd legally be forced to write awful enterprise-style OO-heavy Java, because that's what all the "software engineering" courses at university taught as best practice.
> you're going to personally be better off changing companies
Job mobility for tech workers is a fluke of current economic conditions. If interest rates spike, or a recession happens, or a bubble bursts, this benefit would go away and you'd be stuck at that exploitative company or unemployed.
Unionization and labor laws can make workers less disposable without substantially affecting growth (see: European tech hubs).
> make workers less disposable without substantially affecting growth (see: European tech hubs).
Sorry, but you shot your argument in the foot with this example. The last two months of Europeans trying with great difficulty to replace US tech with local tech have shown just how little tech has grown in Europe relative to the US. Is that because of their labor laws? Unclear. But it's certainly not a shining example of success.
The effort to replace US tech is not anything similar to the European tech industry.
US technology has a hegemony because we were first to the party, our economy is larger, and our laws are hostile to newcomers (lack of interoperability requirements, lack of enforcement of anti-trust laws, strong defense of DMCA laws, non-competes, and trade secret laws).
I've worked in the EU tech sector. They have tons of startups that operate just like US startups: VC funded, hockey-stick growth, and hiring like crazy. Their stricter labor laws don't get in the way of that.
The hyper-growth, VC-funded startup model is itself quite exploitative, but if it's still possible with stricter labor laws, then fears about them impacting growth are unfounded.
>I've worked in the EU tech sector. They have tons of startups that operate just like US startups: VC funded, hockey-stick growth, and hiring like crazy.
Oh, we're talking about bubbly VC growth and not actual GDP growth or growth of sustainable businesses or new useful products. In that case, I suppose I concede.
When I was a high school teacher you either had to belong to the union (CTA) or pay the same dues anyway, and the difference was that they didn't let you vote. I felt that about 90% of the dues were used against me and the students. That was the other big reason I quit, besides the low pay, which the union didn't fix. So I moved on to become a much higher paid developer who has zero pressure to join a union.
My dad was a big union guy. He never crossed a picket line, hated a scab, voted straight Democrat, and put the decal on his tool box. But growing up I saw his own union (IBEW) treat him like shit as he became an employer, and cheat him out of half of his pension. He praised unions while circumventing his own to stay in business.
If unions catch up to me, like the barbed wire caught up to the old cowboys, I'll go look for greener pastures. I'm happier making my own deal with the boss.
> When I was a high school teacher you either had to belong to the union (CTA) or pay the same dues anyway
The Unions that created this system essentially became the system themselves. The government will sure like it and stamp over it. If the Union gets paid regardless, then it'll essentially become useless. Unions where the syndicate has to fight for its salary will act as paid gangoons. They are essentially the police version of the workers.
It's almost like humans universally will use systems of power to further their own aims, rather than altruistic ends. And those who do have an advantage in the accumulation of that power.
Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode" (I moved from academia over a decade ago, and I know the difference). This blog post tries to paint it differently - and it feels like it lacks perspective compared to virtually any other occupation.
> We’re living in a world where billion dollar tech companies expect us to live and breathe code, demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion."
Yet, it is up to us. In some software jobs (AAA game dev and a certain type of startup), you are expected to crunch beyond limits. In other places, you can have a typical 40h/week job at a salary way better than the average 9-5 job. Or you can freelance a dozen hours a week and live in a remote cottage. Or work from Thailand when it's winter. Or take a gap year to regenerate, or reinvent, yourself.
Not many career choices support this freedom. In some (e.g., medical careers), grind is not optional—you won't finish university, you won't get established, and that's the end of the story. In many other jobs, if you were freelancing a dozen hours a week, you would literally not be able to afford food. In many professions, quitting means the end of a career - or at least a serious setback; in tech, it means getting many messages on LinkedIn.
Don't get me wrong - I am all for criticism of grind and exploitation. But let's not paint ourselves, members of one of the most privileged occupations, as victims of the global system.
In my experience as a software engineer rounding out 6 years now, what I have observed in myself and others is that the work pressure that leads to burnout in SWEs is largely self-imposed.
I have some conjectures as to why that may be:
1. High variability of pay, not only between companies but within companies. As a SWE your total compensation can be expected to double every two promotions, and promotions can be pretty fast. Promotions are also not purely a function of tenure like other professions with steep comp growth such as pilots.
2. "This is too good to be true" syndrome. You show up at your comfy 250k job with catered lunch, dinner, and maxed out benefits. After the first month, your workload is about 3-4 hours a day. Everything is flexible - the time you show up, the time you leave, the days you choose to come in to the office, what you wear. Everyone is smart and nice. Free snacks. Imposter syndrome and paranoia set in. Am I doing enough? Should I look at this P2 prod bug on a Satuday? I guess I only worked 20 hours last week so it's fair to work a couple of hours on the weekend. Everything I do needs to be perfect or they could've just hired someone in India for 1/10th my pay, right? etc. Then it snowballs. (I'm probably just describing imposter syndrome.)
In reality nothing really happens if you slow down and do things at a comfortable pace. Most managers want to cultivate reliable people who take long-term deep ownership, not productivity machines that just bang out features. If they needed more output, they'd just hire one more person.
With 25 years experience, the other thing is environments vary a lot, even within a single company. Things can be dysfunctional for lots of reasons, sometimes due to individual incompetence at various points in the hierarchy, or just systemic/cultural issues that no one has the vision or influence to identify and fix. When you're young and inexperienced, but technically brilliant, it's easy to miss the forest for the trees of what's really going on on the human side of things of any large group effort.
One of the things I value the most about working at startups in my early career is that it allows relatively "junior" folks more exposure to the big picture, and thus stay grounded in reality and not swayed by all the random narratives that are floated around in the corporate world. No matter how smart you are, or how honest and well intentioned the intent of the speaker, it takes experience to be able to parse through these and understand when and how they are relevant to your individual work. I see a lot of folks over the last 15 years who got hired into big tech during boom times, never got anywhere near the critical path of the business, and were exposed to all manner dysfunction by ambitious but incompetent social climbers who swelled the ranks of anything with the whiff of success. In these types of environment, people who just want to do good software engineering work can easily get swept into various dead end buckets of learned helpless, rest-and-vest, burnout, etc.
> That if unionization is so cleary net positive for most workplaces, then it wouldn’t need any sustained agitation campaigns in the first place.
> As any company that unionizes would near automatically gain a huge competitive advantage.
No, your "observation" has a fundamental flaw: There's no general "net positive for most workplaces," because different groups have different interests.
Unionization is a "net negative" for certain groups (managers, owners) and a "net positive" for others (employees, if done right). That's why there are sustained agitation campaigns against it.
We (especially those with an entrepreneurial bent like so many of us frequenting this site in particular) have so effectively been sold the illusion that class no longer exists that most have us have genuinely become blind to the idea that a company's interests (i.e. the interests of owners, shareholders, the board, investors, whatever - maximizing profits or ROI) and a worker's interests (e.g. a sustainable, stable and reliable income with potential for career advancement providing access to better pay/perks) usually run directly opposite to each other. Class conflict is inherent to the employer-employee or owner-worker dynamic. You can merely afford the luxury of pretending it doesn't exist when it's in their interest (i.e. doing so aligns with their goals, usually in the short-term) to "pamper" you - and that era may be drawing to a close within our lifetimes.
Every single worker is ultimately disposable. If you think your employer is disposable to you, that's not because you're special but because so far you've been extremely lucky. It is far easier for a company to replace a worker than it is for a worker to replace the company they work for - we just tend to see the "inability to find a new job" as a personal failure (i.e. bad performance at the job of "finding a job") whereas we take the existence of job vacancies for granted as a normal part of the market and maybe even a positive indicator for "growth" (which we define as desirable even if it's artificial or unsustainable).
It should also be pointed out that it's not just the money aspect. Managing people is difficult, managing people in a stressful situation is really difficult, add a dysfunctional culture (especially if that culture is "imposed" from above) is a pain in the proverbial. Which means managing in these situations is hard work.
Add on top of that that a largish number of managers just plain suck at their job, so being in a union can be useful to push back against either lazy or incompetent managers.
Because there are far more people who leave their manager than leave their job.
This is an interesting take, but I have a slightly different take. My ding dong company pays everyone including myself, salaries that are way too high. They gave ne a 30% raise I didn't even ask for or expect. We get a contract to do X, which say should take a team of 5 folks. However, we can only staff the contract with 3 folks because our salaries are too high. Now, we're all working 80hr weeks and stressed to the max because we really need more fresh minds on the challenge.
Now, we're in a contract lull, so some of us are only charging part time (75%), while actually working overtime.
It's bananas.
The solution seems obvious. Decrease salaries and increase company stock offerings. Then, if you and your colleagues care to work harder and deliver outstanding product, your stock value will rise over time and you'll be a.) more wealthy than taking 'dumb' money, and b.) more physically and mentally healthy.
People do stuff like skim, see 'decrease salaries' and click down without really thinking or even reading it all. It can be kinda random and not worth worrying about.
> In my experience as a software engineer rounding out 6 years now, what I have observed in myself and others is that the work pressure that leads to burnout in SWEs is largely self-imposed.
This is how control works in our society. It's true for all people.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han explains it well in "The Burnout Society".
> the work pressure that leads to burnout in SWEs is largely self-imposed
Nothing happens in a vacuum and this "self-imposed" work pressure often happens within the a company culture that is either intentionally or accidentally highly demanding of individuals. The "self-imposed" is a false front for enforced expectations from colleagues, managers and clients.
We're all in unique situations and you can say if you don't like it then don't work there. However the hustle and start up cultures are viral and spread throughout the industry. Just look at all the talk of Elon Musk & his Twitter and Doge employees working 100 hours weeks and sleeping at the office. Regardless of politics, there are many people who talk about this insane, unhealthy and inefficient level of work as a good and worthy thing. It's the Puritan work ethic myth. In reality the majority of the benefit of this work does not go to the individual doing the work, instead they pay a heavy cost with their quality of life.
I'd add 3: most of us really like this stuff. Sometimes I get pinged in the evening for some issue. I have the freedom to say I'll check it out in the morning, or on Monday. Sometimes I do, but often I'll look at it. There's definitely a little bit of 2 in there, but mostly it's because checking it out is fun, and solving it is rewarding.
I try not to overdo it. You can still burn out from that sort of thing even if you like it. But as long as it's not excessive, I enjoy the occasional "Sorry it's late, but are you around to take a look at this?"
> This blog post tries to paint it differently - and it feels it lacks perspective with virtually any other occupations.
On one hand, misery and happiness are relative. On the other hand, try telling a construction worker how hard our lives are sitting in chairs clicking buttons.
My dad used to have to do things like hot tar roofing to pay the bills. So I still consider it a blessing to get to work in software.
I think one thing that needs to be understood better is the concept of "burnout". I think it's wrong to equate it with "working hard". I've known farmers and restaurateurs who work insane hours for decades and never think about burning out. On the other hand, I have felt burned out 3 weeks into a job where I did nothing. I think it has little to do with how hard we work and everything to do with our perception of progress.
I think burnout is Cool Hand Luke being forced to dig a ditch and fill it back up again, for days.
It’s putting in effort without seeing anything concrete to show for it.
If you tar a roof, you can see a roof that will keep out the rain. If you cook a meal, you see someone who was hungry but now full. A lot of jobs don’t have that feedback loop.
Many jobs, including construction, service jobs, even many medical jobs, do not require even the thought of work outside of working hours.
Anecdotally many in these positions that I am friends with will attest that it's great to get off work and pretend work didn't happen and go on with their real life, because they don't have deadlines or projects to stress over, arduous performance reviews, or extensive office politicking and empire-building.
>I think one thing that needs to be understood better is the concept of "burnout".
I can explain it pretty well.
You can classify pretty much all jobs into 2 categories - map lookups and reasoning.
A map lookup job is something where you learn to associate a specific problem with a solution. Most jobs are like this. You go work in construction, its pretty much map lookup - supervisor tells you to go prep the concrete, you know the procedure to do it, you go do it. Even high end jobs like VPs are often map lookups, you aren't really thinking about solving any problems, just following the standard procedure of what works and are essentially relying on the actual work of lower ranked people to give you data.
Reasoning jobs are those where you don't have the solution for a particular problem in memory, so you figure it out. For example, business strategy, despite being non technical, is a reasoning problem - there are a lot of variables you have to consider, and success in this regard often involves things like figuring out what you have to do, which is a separate task than actually doing it.
Software engineering is interesting because it can be both. Setting up standard service stacks is often a map lookup job. The interviews themselves test on map lookup really, as most of the problems fall within the scope of pointer manipulation or n-linked lists, with memorizing specific hard ones in case you get asked those. But fundamentally, software development is a reasoning type job.
The burnout happens when someone in software engineering is good at map lookup, but is actually needed to do reasoning, and has no education or training on how to do the latter. For example, I worked at Amazon. Id estimate that if I asked a random sample of 100 engineers to give me http traffic from a service, 1 out of 100 of them would know how to do it, and only about 10 or so would be able to actually go figure it out on their own.
This is why people who are good at reasoning can really do any job well. If you take a software engineer who is extremely competent and can build complex solutions, and make them in charge of optimizing things like delivery, shipping and warehouse storage, or finance management of a company (excluding the emotional response to those jobs), they would be able to do it well.
Whereas people who are good at map lookups tend to be only good at certain jobs in certain quantities.
My experience with burnout doesn't really gel with this. I find map lookup style tasks as you describe them pretty draining and the reasoning tasks relatively more energising.
But generally what actually causes burnout for me is a sense of pointlessness, that the work is nothing but the pay because it's, for example, just some B2B finance adjacent system or something.
Great comments from both of you. I will also add the (unsupportive) environment and uncertainty for the future as major factors IMHO.
One should also consider the "outside" environment. We jumped from covid right into war without a break in between and now we are being told that we will be replaced by AI, while expecting the stock market to crash and increase unemployment. Ah and also the inflation (wage reduction) that has been going on for the last five years and doesn't show a sign of stopping.
I don't think thats burnout, its more like apathy. I am the same way. When I worked for Amazon, I spend half sundays writing scripts that almost automated my map look up tasks (like stuff for oncall)
Burnout is when you are overworked with regular activities that you see no other way to accomplish.
It’s exactly the opposite. Burnout happens when a person with high reasoning skills is not allowed to actually used them and forced into map lookup tasks (most commonly with a useless, here be dragons kind of map).
This is exactly my experience. I like to think I'm a decent thinker. I've spent the past 6 months basically in constant burnout, started smoking again and am up to a pack a day now, because my job is "we're going to tell you that you have ownership over this perimeter, and then give you basically zero leeway in how to do things. You have to do it this way because that's what the senior architect with the hard-on for every new DevOps tool has decided. You thought that db migration could be done with just a simple script and modifying a few API endpoints? Lol No, we're using Temporal. Wait,why do you keep telling us you want to quit and go back to doing maths research?"
I would argue if you are actually good at reasoning, you can easily optimize and make the map lookup tasks efficient and automated. Unless the environment doesn't allow you to do so.
Eh, your definition implies people who are actually skilled (i.e. able to do "reasoning" jobs) don't/can't suffer from burnout. I'd bet there are cases of the opposite of what you describe, where people would be able to solve problems with reasoning, but get burnt out from being locked into a map-lookup structure. Or cases where people are good at, or enjoy, reasoning about one type of problem, but then get thrown into a different field they're not as attuned to or interested in.
In terms of mental process, whenever someone is performing a task, they are looking up information on either directly how to do the task, or are running some thought process (i.e simulation of the world) to figure out some unknown.
Ive been burned out and am VERY good at reasoning. In fact, my burnout was largely because my role went from relatively undisturbed reasoning most of the time with long, but not extreme hours, to extreme hours where I was actively punished for reasoning - all while being micromanaged and pulled in many directions.
And yet, if I had found the new role to be meaningful and, moreover, with and for decent people (rather than a psychopath), I could totally have done all of that.
Burnout comes from when your life has no meaning and, worse, your attempts to find/create meaning are prevented (or worse).
"Those who have a why to live can endure almost any how"
> On the other hand, try telling a construction worker how hard our lives are sitting in chairs clicking buttons.
Construction workers usually chose to do that job instead of call center, cashier or elderly care for instance. The perception of what's stressful or "hard" is I think different (illegal workers who can't do these jobs in the first place being another can of worms)
I also think this is the same perspective for burnout, repetitively doing something that is felt as mind crushing will be a trigger, but what is felt as mind cushing vastly depend on individuals, preferences and predispositions. I don't think there's a single yardstick for that.
I did physical labour when I was younger in a tropical climate and in certain ways it's easier than my SWE job is now.
There are days in SWE where I feel completely and utterly drained and brain dead despite doing nothing but just "clicking buttons". The physical exercise from the job site in comparison was heaven a lot of the time, and even these days when I'm stuck in my 4th useless meeting of the day, I find myself yearning for shovelling in the scorching sun.
IMO, this is a bad take. I've been in this industry long enough to have heard all the arguments presented here before— it's the classic ones: "pay is good", "not all jobs are bad", "others have it worse", etc.
We're in a strategic industry with lots of investment, and a lot of us who check Hacker News have good enough resumes to be in demand, but this doesn't change the fact we —software engineers as a whole— are workers. We might be well-paid, but we're still working class.
If you go outside the top-school bubble, or the usa-tech bubble, this is more evident. Take the money and generous stock grants away and the job is basically indistinguishable from any other white-collar job. Most software developers around the world can't work from Thailand when it's winter. Or take a gap year to reinvent themselves. Or find freelance work that'd allow them to live comfortably with only a dozen hours of work a week.
The incentive of companies is always to have their workers produce more, for less. Thankfully in the USA especially the stars are aligned to give "top software engineering talent" enough leverage to enjoy career mobility and cushy pay. We're at the right place at the right time.
The incentive of companies is always to have their workers produce more for less, and trust me, they're trying. It might be AI, it might be a growing supply of developers, it might be a change in investment strategies— that "top software engineering talent" pool will shrink and a lot of developers will be hit with the realization they weren't some permanent exception in the system. We might feel like we're part of the bourgeoisie because we get big cheques from the companies we work for, but we're much closer factory-line work than a lot of people realize.
Being a worker doesn't mean "working class". That phrase pretty specifically is for people who do some sort of physical work. We fall under "professional class", people who mostly do knowledge work, traditionally at a desk in an office. They're both generally considered part of the middle class.
you can put a lipstick on a pig with some linkedin lingo like “professional class” or “working professional” but that is just for bars to impress boys/girls. end of the day you are worker and working class. the fact that you might be in the office while someone is out enjoying the sun at the construction site is just geography
In the original Marxist meaning, the working class is anybody who exchanges their labor (physical or otherwise) for a wage (hourly or salaried). This is defined in opposition to the bourgeoisie, who control the means of production and earn money from the labor of others.
There's no reason why tech unions can't have solidarity with other unionization efforts (and there are thousands of reason why we should have that solidarity).
Us tech workers could be leveraging the privilege we have to get better conditions for everyone.
A perfect example is non-compete clauses. Tech workers enjoy high job mobility, which is only hindered by non-competes. It's no accident that major tech hubs were some of the first states to ban them, helping all workers.
> Us tech workers could be leveraging the privilege we have to get better conditions for everyone.
Yes.
A bit of context here: I am European and take for granted many things related to social safety (healthcare, benefits, parental leave, or various sorts) and equal opportunity (free education, public transportation, etc.). Many views of Bernie Sanders are mainstream by European standards (vide https://www.quora.com/How-far-to-the-left-is-Bernie-Sanders-...).
Yet, in Poland, there are various lower taxes for software engineers (and some other similar professionals). I don't consider it fair. Yes, many people feel that they work hard (and they do!) or that their friends earn even more.
But at the same time, it takes talking with anyone in education, retail, or care to see that what is considered unacceptable pay for any IT job is, for many, a dream salary. While inequality is not nearly as enormous as in the US, it is still.
So yes, if these are system changes that benefit all workers - wonderful!
> A perfect example is non-compete clauses.
Yes.
In Europe, you are often paid by the previous employer if you have such a clause. So, it only makes sense in a reasonable case where you could directly pass know-how on to the competitors. But not as a leash.
I can't relate to "easy mode" past the layoffs. Everything has turned into a nightmare with employer expectations. Everyone I speak to feels the same. Things are not the way they are.
Absurd Schedules - Yes
Unrealistic Deadlines - Yes
Competing Colleageues -Yes
Toxic environment - Yes
Hard to switch - Yes
Outsourcing - Yes
Training your replacements -Yes
How is this easy mode? Mental labor can be as bad or even worse than Physical labor. Atleast you hit a brick wall with physical. Your enemy is inivisible when its mental.
The problem with the "it could be worse" line of thinking is it ignores that it could also be better.
Yes, there are far worse jobs. Yes, being a slave is infinitely worse than being a software engineer.
But that's like saying "oh, using 3G isn't that bad, dial-up is worse." Sure, but if you can get fiber-optic, that's better. A lot better. And you'll do better work that way (assuming you use the internet in your work, which, if you're a dev, you probably do).
"Oh, running our entire infrastructure on a 10 year old ThinkPad isn't that bad, it could be worse, we could have a PDP-11". Sure, and you could also rent a beast of a server from OVH/Hetzner/etc for relatively cheap, and that might make life a little nicer, for you, and for your customers.
If you've got half your workforce burning out, that's a fucking issue, and while yes, compared to 99% of jobs that ever existed (medival peasant, prostitute, garbage man, street musician, cashier) this is quite nice, if people keep developing mental health issues as a result of it, that's an issue.
And in that case, if the "market solution" is basically unionize to demand better conditions...
My initial reaction to this whole thing was the same as yours (not that I have any love lost for academics). Software engineers do basically no physical labor and usually get paid better than many people who physically work way harder. On the whole, software engineers are not "the victim," as you said.
However, your examples made me think.
> In other places, you can have a typical 40h/week job at a salary way better than the average 9-5 job.
Can you? Can everyone? I've job hunted before and known many more people who've taken way longer than me to find a position at all, in several different locations throughout the country (not coastal metropolises). You're kind of suggesting that unemployment isn't an issue in the industry, which is a pretty blanketed take.
> Or you can freelance a dozen hours a week and live in a remote cottage.
Can you meet friends while living in a remote cottage? Can you raise kids well in a remote cottage? (Does the remote cottage even have internet?) This one is technically true, but ignores many of the reasons most people work/live in the first place. I say that as someone who's considered going that route.
So while I agree software engineers aren't a "victim class" as compared to other industries, I also think using the "it could be worse" excuse to avoid working for better conditions that are totally feasible isn't a great thing to do. The majority of software engineers are middle-class, and when the middle-class is under attack, they're going down with the rest of the ship, not up. Perhaps it'd be better to foster a little more solidarity instead of inviting us vs. them mentality.
This isn’t wrong. In every industry, there will always be people who struggle to find employment. It’s a necessary part of the economic machine. One hopes it is not always the same person suffering, of course.
Still, absolutely everything about this industry is inflated. Pepsi just bought Poppi for $1.5B. That’s a HUGE DEAL, but hardly worth mentioning when compared with the $70B that Microsoft spent on Activision-Blizzard.
Making $80k a year is a GREAT salary. That’s going to invoke a hearty yawn from many when comparing to dev salaries.
Hell, you don’t even need a degree to get in. Just the knowledge to back yourself up in an interview.
I’m old enough to remember the hiring frenzy of the dot-com bubble, as well as many smaller hiring frenzies since.
Having watched my parents claw their way to a very happy retirement, it’s insane how easy life is in this career field.
I bring great energy to my teams, but technically I’m not incredible. I’ve never been Big-N quality. Still, I’m going to retire earlier in my life than my dad, who (very regrettably) even got an infusion of life insurance cash via my mom’s passing. I’ll retire with more spending power too. I have one nice toy - a car I spent $45k on. Otherwise, I live a modest life on my income, but all of this is based on watching my parents’ spending habits and lifestyle, so it feels like a fair comparison to me at least.
This is an absolutely blessed field. Can’t imagine where I’d be if I’d been born even just a hundred years ago.
> Making $80k a year is a GREAT salary. That’s going to invoke a hearty yawn from many when comparing to dev salaries.
I'd like to draw a distinction here:
$80k is very good, by the standards of what most people can get.
$80k is middling-to-poor compared to how fast the cost of living is going up. Housing prices are skyrocketing, people have no savings, can't afford emergencies.
The economy is leaving people behind. In my area, SWE pay moves closer to "normal difficulty" every year, while everyone else moves to "hard".
My starting salary was a not-extravagant $55K 25 years ago when .coms were handing out $100K+ to CS grads. That's $100K today. $80K is exceedingly low even for juniors in a highly skilled profession
The real issue is that companies aren't willing to increase pay even with the rate of inflation. This isn't a controversial take.
So yeah, you may be loyal to the company, and you may show loyalty by coming to all the "mandatory fun" events as well as the "all hands meetings." But the reality is that they pay the minimum what they can get away with. And the more loyal you are, the more they can pay less.
If you think about it, on one hand it's a market based approach -- which is probably the right answer for management to do. On the other hand, if there's no incentive for you to go out of your way, you won't. Nor will you work harder if all you're going to get is a %2 pay raise, even though the last year you closed on average 3 tickets per work day.
There's a lot of places in America where $80k is not a great salary. Unfortunately, as much of America slides further and further right people who don't fit the right's ideal have to be more and more selective about where they live.
Most "contract killers" aren't the super pro movie kind. (Though I'm sure they exist.) Most are young guys, or children even, doing sloppy hit-n-runs to climb some gang hierarchy for really not a lot of money.
I wonder whether you could extrapolate off other industries.
IE things like sports or music where the top 1% make f*k-you money and the rest either get by or struggle. Do they have to do the occasional public performance to build hype?
Or maybe it's more like a tradie. I always thought Leon:The Professional was a story about an apprenticeship, not that movies are a source of truth on real life.
Software developers, unlike many other professions, can be self taught at almost no cost. You don't need a license, you don't need to pass any qualifying/gatekeeping exams, you don't need expensive tools, you don't need any supplies or inventory. Consequently there is a never-ending supply of new young developers who are hungrier than you and will do the work for less or do more work for the same.
I developed debilitating tendinitis in both wrists right about the time I graduated college. A decade later, I developed a bulged disc in my neck that ended my career.
There are very real risks to your body from sitting at a computer, deep in thought all day. There's a whole other swath of health issues, too, beside injury risks.
Take some responsibility for your own health. You're not chained to your desk; get up and walk around occasionally. Go for a run or hit a quick gym session during your lunch break.
I started having wrist pain years ago and switched to an ergonomic split keyboard years ago which completely fixed that problem. Little laptop keyboard are terrible for any extensive typing.
I type every single day and I don't want your health problem placing limits on my job flexibility and career advancement.
If our industry fills with unions, suddenly I won't be able to job hop to positions that look interesting to me. I'll have to consider things like seniority and tenure and a bunch of artificial rules. It'll be like going back to high school. I prefer to break rules, color outside the lines, and set my own path.
In normal countries, the role of unions is to ensure that your rights and livelihood are secured when your body or mind sustains damage from a work injury.
It sounds like your idea about what unions are and do are deeply informed by abnormal circumstances.
Engineering salaries in Europe are held back compared to the US by market forces (notably lack of investment), not unions. Unions representing highly educated workers do not typically engage in collective bargaining on salary, but rather supply legal aid and continuing education. It’s useful to have an army of lawyers on your side when the MBAs in charge try to cheat you and take away that promised equity, just to take one example.
In general it’s surprisingly difficult to compare salaries, because the US is a complete anomaly here. The tech bubble, stock inflation, real estate prices in SF and NY, student debt are all contributing factors.
In my anecdotal experience, there is little difference in actual disposable income for software engineers in the US and North West Europe, even when one makes $200,000/year and the other makes €100,000/year.
Good one, moved from France to Hong Kong, can confirm. We all move to non-unionized countries to finally be free to make money. When we go back, ofc we're all like "oh yeah you're so right, protect your right to work 35 hours, the boss is evil anyway" :D
Having healthcare tied to employment is antithetical to the most basic principles of our economy: people should be able to freely and easily change jobs and/or pause employment--that is the "free" in free market.
Working nights and weekends got me a close to ten figure exit at a now publicly traded fintech. So yeah, I don't mind.
Rather than retiring on that money, I'm back at it again, and I'm working even harder.
I know what mediocrity and complacency is. I've worked surrounded by it, and I'll do anything to avoid it. I don't want that bullshit where coworkers strive to do the minimum and everybody plays hot potato to see who will take responsibility.
I'll take responsibility. And I'll take the high comp that comes with it. Not have some union pencil in my salary band according to arbitrary rules that don't directly map to solving customer problems.
> Working nights and weekends got me a close to ten figure exit at a now publicly traded fintech. So yeah, I don't mind.
It's an entirely different matter if you stand to make huge gains if the company succeeds. That is not the majority of jobs in the field. Most of us will never even have the opportunity to be involved in one of those. That's not what this discussion is about.
But don't enforce that on your underlings. I have such a boss and let me tell you, it sucks!
Your underlings have lives and passions that have nothing to do with you or your work, and more importantly they don't have that founders' equity and opportunity for a 10-figure exit.
If you want that kind of excellence, be prepared to pay for it dearly. Market-rate TCO is not nearly enough.
While I don’t necessarily disagree with the larger point on mediocrity, that’s a massive instance of survivorship bias. For every you there’s a hundred others that burned themselves out only for them to be fired a moment after.
I'm such a scatter brained dumbass sometimes. I meant "near 8 figures". I'm nowhere near "three commas" of wealth. I was emotionally responding to these pro-union comments between work and can't simple math.
I still can't fathom the headspace of people wanting to do less and be entitled to more while the rest of the world is catching up and offering a better value. The lasier we get, the less likely we'll be picked to do the work. And this is such a goddamned cushy job. Are we so fucking entitled we're complaining about our career? Seriously?
I also can't reason about why people think this is about money rather than building cool shit. If this is your hobby and you enjoy building, why wouldn't you want to do this? Especially if you pick your problem space?
Why are there so many people like this on a startup forum? Shouldn't everyone here be hustling and working hard? I don't get this attitude, and I don't want people like that on my team to drag me down.
I support this because precisely because it is not everyone's hobby, even if it is mine. I have more than enough money. Some people do not. And I assure you it's not because they are lazier or dumber than I am.
> I also can't reason about why people think this is about money rather than building cool shit.
I'm working to make money to pay my mortgage, put food on the table, save for retirement, and build a better life for my small family. That is the motivation that keeps me showing up.
If I want to build cool shit then I'll do it on my own time. Unfortunately, not everyone can build a startup.
The fact that you think a union only exists to "drag (you) down" speaks a lot about you.
What? You claim to have gotten a nearly 10 figure exit, yet you claim you made 450 k$ TC in your last job [1]. Even a maximally conservative estimate of 100,000,001 $ for a “nearly 10 figure exit” (being literally 1 dollar over 9 figures) would get you over 4 M$ annually in risk free treasuries. Why would you work for 450 k$?
I have no idea why you replied to me with this irrelevant nonsense, but a unions regularly protect injured workers from being fired (often for fabricated reasons). This is also why companies love illegal immigrants. When José loses a finger at the cannery, management just slips him a bus ticket back to Mexico and mentions that if he comes back they'll have to call immigration about some irregularities.
I was lucky enough that this happened before the modern era of cutthroat corporate behavior, and I was able to get physical therapy and ergonomic changes to fix the problem.
I type every single day and I don't want your health problem placing limits on my job flexibility and career advancement.
Again, WTF are you even talking about? What union? How does this imaginary union inhibit your ability to change jobs?
All I did was point out that sedentary jobs still have plenty of injury risk.
> unions regularly protect injured workers from being fired (often for fabricated reasons). This is also why companies love illegal immigrants. When José loses a finger at the cannery, management just slips him a bus ticket back to Mexico and mentions that if he comes back they'll have to call immigration about some irregularities.
You are describing factory work. This has no relevancy to our career. We are in one of the cushiest job sectors on the planet currently.
I have literally never seen anything in my entire professional career in software that would necessitate a union to "protect" us. My last employer gave us massages at work, FFS, and I've always had flexible working hours where I can show up at the office pretty much any time I want.
I had a few colleagues develop carpal tunnel and work always provided time off, medical benefits, special accommodations, standing desks, monitor risers, ergo keyboards, etc.
> Again, WTF are you even talking about? What union? How does this imaginary union inhibit your ability to change jobs?
Sorry, most of this thread is about unions and I accidentally roped you into that. I don't want the specter of carpel tunnel to be a rationalization for unions.
Unions are a tool to prevent abuse of workers. We do not have a systemic issue with that in our field - conversely, we have one the cushiest careers on the planet.
I don't want us to install unions. There's very little reason to do so, and it'll damage the incredibly cushy status quo we have going for us:
1. Union seniority often means you have to stay at the same job or within the same set of employers as your union, which fractures the labor market, leads to unnecessary job specialization, and prevents mobility. This also ossifies institutional knowledge as the free exchange of ideas slows.
2. Union seniority perks mean new employees do the drudge work and senior employees get the perks. This is the wrong incentive alignment.
3. Creating barriers to fire underperforming workers will lead to offshoring. Offshoring will happen naturally as other countries get better at labor export, but unionization will prematurely accelerate this. We shouldn't be seeking to do less than our overseas counterparts, especially when our comp levels remain higher than most other professions. (I'm not biased against folks overseas, just stating that the labor markets will not mix if we don't accelerate it ourselves.)
4. Tech sectors in countries with unions pay workers significantly less and have fewer innovative companies (by volume). The tradeoff for "job security" is not worth it. Currently "job security" is the ability to provide value to your organization, and that works pretty well. This is what I mean by I don't want unions limiting my career - I have a pretty good success rate getting the jobs I want. Unions create a check box of criteria and fence people in.
5. The correct way to mitigate injuries is disability insurance, not unions. Companies shouldn't be saddled with employees that can no longer work. Companies (and employees) should instead pay for disability insurance.
There are a lot of other points, but you can see the outline of my argument. We're creating reasons to be less desirable to employers and installing barriers to career mobility.
If the situation on the ground changes, I might change my mind about unions. But as things currently stand, we still have almost everything going for us.
The real "anti-corporate" issue we should be fighting for is a trust-busting breakup of big tech into smaller firms. The FAANG companies control too much surface area, monopolize their platforms, and create barriers to entry for new companies and new markets - despite their high comp, this is what's putting the most downward pressure on the overall labor market.
>> Software engineers do basically no physical labor
I know this is not like lifing boxes or bricks, but my main labor is a 2+hr commute each way to work -- why?
1. Because so many decent paying tech jobs are close to expensive cities
2. Because the jobs pay well, but not enough to live super close to the offices
3. Even if i lived closed to the office, the jobs are so volatile and changing you'd switch from south bay to SF to Oakland back to Fremont so you cant pick a single spot to live
4. You do this stupid 2hr commute only to go into a phonebooth "office" and sit alone on zoom calls with people in Asia who arent even in the same office
a sexy adventure.
i met a hot japanese girl online. i wanted to meet her but during covid japan was closed. so i enrolled in a year at a japanese language school to get a student visa.
well now we are married, baby is due soon. and i can speak japanese.
in a couple years well be making a slightly larger cottage back in the US and then ill be a cottage man again.
whenever we are having a tough day, we just think of waking up to the blue sky and chirping birds in the countryside. but now the vision includes little feet
Some tangential thoughts and rambles on this to try to get at the deeper issues, first from Jeff Schmidt about his book "Disciplined Minds" which encourages solidarity of intellectual workers: https://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
"Who are you going to be? That is the question. In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy. Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."
An even deeper point though from "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080702023453/http://www.whywor...
"Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By “play” I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. ..."
Or, from a different direction, from "Buddhist Economics" by EF Schumacher:
https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/buddhist-econ...
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
And also from an even different direction by Marshall Sahlins' "The Original Affluent Society":
https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/298-june-19-1979/the-ori...
"For there are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be “easily satisfied” either by producing much or desiring little. The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way, makes assumptions peculiarly appropriate to market economies: that man’s wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improvable: thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that “urgent goods” become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own: that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty—with a low standard of living. ... The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization. It has grown with civilization, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation—that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo. ..."
Or from an even different direction as a cautionary tale (spoilers if you read the Wikipedia article beyond what I quoted):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands_...
""With Folded Hands ..." is a 1947 science fiction novelette[1] by American writer Jack Williamson (1908–2006). In writing it, Willamson was influenced by the aftermath of World War II, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his concern that "some of the technological creations we had developed with the best intentions might have disastrous consequences in the long run."[2] ... Despite the humanoids' benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. ..."
Or also on re-envisioning work and status: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
"The Mayflower II has brought with it thousands of settlers, all the trappings of the authoritarian regime along with bureaucracy, religion, fascism and a military presence to keep the population in line. However, the planners behind the generation ship did not anticipate the direction that Chironian society took: in the absence of conditioning and with limitless robotic labor and fusion power, Chiron has become a post-scarcity economy. Money and material possessions are meaningless to the Chironians and social standing is determined by individual talent, which has resulted in a wealth of art and technology without any hierarchies, central authority or armed conflict. In an attempt to crush this anarchist adhocracy, the Mayflower II government employs every available method of control; however, in the absence of conditioning the Chironians are not even capable of comprehending the methods, let alone bowing to them. The Chironians simply use methods similar to Gandhi's satyagraha and other forms of nonviolent resistance to win over most of the Mayflower II crew members, who had never previously experienced true freedom, and isolate the die-hard authoritarians."
Or more down-to-Earth by Doug Engelbart (creator of the 1960s Mother of All Demos showing interactive collaborative computing and teleconferencing and the mouse):
https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/191/
"In Doug Engelbart's terms, an improvement community is any group involved in a collective pursuit to improve a given capability or condition. Some examples include a professional association, a community of practice, consortium, humanitarian initiative, initiatives to reform education, healthcare, government, corporate initiatives, a medical research community seeking to cure a specific disease. An improvement community that also puts focused attention on improving how it engages, and how it improves, by employing better and better practices and tools, is a networked improvement community (NIC)."
Where a "networked improvement community" also connects with Brian Eno's idea of "Scenius":
https://medium.com/salvo-faraday/what-is-the-scenius-15409eb...
"There’s a common myth that genius is only produced and achieved in isolation. This is commonly referred to as the “Great Man Theory”, that innovation in art and culture only comes from great men working in solitude. Brian Eno, musician, producer, and inventor of the term “scenius”, describes scenius as similar to genius except embedded in a scene rather than in genes. ..."
And by Howard Zinn on "The Coming Revolt of the Guards": https://historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
"The new conditions of technology, economics, and war, in the atomic age, make it less and less possible for the guards of the system-the intellectuals, the home owners, the taxpayers, the skilled workers, the professionals, the servants of government-to remain immune from the violence (physical and psychic) inflicted on the black, the poor, the criminal, the enemy overseas."
Anyway, people can debate on whether unions will improve the day-to-day experience of software developers including regarding "burnout", but that is just scratching the surface of social change related to work compared to ideas like above.
Thank you for maintaining such an interesting, eclectic set of reading materials on the topic. I’ve already skimmed through a few of your suggested readings and I’m sold on your general approach. This is going to be something I keep coming back to over time.
Apparently, and if I'm getting that right, that there are many other ways in which societies can organize themselves to produce riches and the arguably undesirable one we've got right now is not unavoidable despite being sold as such.
> I also think using the "it could be worse" excuse to avoid working for better conditions that are totally feasible isn't a great thing to do.
Unions fuck up the incentives. Tenured positions are coveted and come with privileges that make the job easier and the position more cushy. New hires want those perks and will rest once they attain them. This is the opposite of what you want in a workforce: you want the top 50% to work hard and fight for raises and promotions.
In our industry, when we don't get the promotions or raises we want, we switch jobs. Job switching has been an incredible means of advancing our careers and being exposed to new tech and new problems. Because of tenure and different jobs using different unions, unions will lead to fewer job changes and more "lifers" that stick around at a single job for a long time. That ossifies code, stops the influx of new ideas and talent, and causes super weird code / business unit ownership drama. It's also super boring.
Tech companies aren't afraid of high salaries (evidently so!) as much as they are of non-fungibility and ossification of the workforce. Unions make slow businesses even slower. Because of this, unions lead to offshoring.
Unions have ground so many industries to a halt in the US. Manufacturing, automotive. Most recently, the film industry (particularly crew) have been offshored -- in the last several years productions have moved to Eastern Europe and Asia sans any US workforce. They fly the cast (without crew) out for the shoots. It's all because of unions.
If we wish this upon ourselves -- in one of the cushiest careers in the world -- we'll soon find all of our jobs moving overseas.
I don't understand how you can make these comments but not thread the needle that the problems you are worried about is strictly the result of capital. Acting as if labor creating a union means Capital should just pack up shop and leave is an extreme power imbalance.
This imbalance not only justifies the need for collective bargaining, but that there should be more regulations wielded against Capital to stop this imbalance.
A flourishing middle class helps a country prosper, a flourishing middle class means a strong labor class where Capital has limits and regulations on what they can inflict against civilians.
The capital flees almost in its entirety to non-union countries once unions grow in power, that's why.
Go ask the IATSE (film) folks how many jobs they're getting this year. (All their jobs left to developing economies in Eastern Europe and Asia. Cast gets flown out, but the crew are hired and based overseas.)
Unions contributed to the decline of US steel, US shipbuilding, US automotive, etc.
A worker can be both fungible and highly compensated. None of us are irreplaceable, and nor should we be. A union tries to put in artificial barriers where businesses need flexibility, and businesses really don't like that.
The union had no choices when capital decides they want more money.
Look at what you're arguing here dude. You're blaming workers for trying to protect their jobs when the issue is that capital is too powerful and needs to be regulated more.
Even more odd you're mentioning shipbuilding an industry that use to have its workers centrally planned by the US government to provide educated skilled labor but was killed off in the 80s by the pro-corpo Reagan admin.
I do agree with you that we should do this more, regulate companies harsher while giving more protections to workers.
> Even more odd you're mentioning shipbuilding an industry that use to have its workers centrally planned by the US government to provide educated skilled labor but was killed off in the 80s by the pro-corpo Reagan admin.
It was killed off by the Jones Act, which "shielded" us from having to be competitive. Tariffs are one lever for establishing fractional protectionism, but the Jones Act was absolute. It essentially turned our industry into the Dodo with no competitive exposure.
> You're blaming workers for trying to protect their jobs when the issue is that capital is too powerful and needs to be regulated more.
The rest of the world is already getting really good at film and entertainment. We're no longer in a blessed position of being number one with a wide margin, and our goods have to compete in a worldwide marketplace. You want to make our product even more expensive to produce at a time when it should be getting cheaper? That's literally going to kill our industry. And then those people will have nowhere to work anyway.
> regulate companies harsher while giving more protections to workers.
This kills the companies, and then there are no jobs.
Companies don't exist to provide jobs. Companies exist to create value for those buying their goods and services. The minute companies stop being about that, they get out-competed.
Jobs and the nature of work changes all the time. Regulations and unions make companies stagnant and ossified. When they're put into straight jackets, they can't move nimbly enough to provide value.
If you want unions, then you must also be a big fan of tariffs. Because switching to domestic only production and keeping our entire market isolationist is the only way an expensive and inflexible labor equation works out. It's big fish, small pond thinking rather than small fish, big pond. (Or actually giant fish, big pond - which is what we are, but will cease to be if we keep shooting ourselves in the foot.)
Do you want to allow affordable and advanced BYD cars into the American market? They weren't produced with unionized labor. Their employees are working their asses off. What do you think that'll do?
What about production companies, some foreign capital financed, that hire American actors and fly them to a cheap Asian or Eastern European country to be filmed with cheap local crew labor? How do we stack up against that? Do we need more unions?
>Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode" (I moved from academia over a decade ago, and I know the difference).
well I have worked all sorts of physically demanding jobs, digging ditches, building offices, tearing down offices...
So yes Software Engineering is easy - except when it's not. When it's easy it is real easy. When it's not it is significantly worse than most of the time at these other jobs. It is hard to explain the stress that a computer can give you when it is refusing for hours to do what you tell it to, but that stress is a lot worse than the stresses of landscaping in my experience.
Some people got a career path like this, and in fact I either personally have or know someone who has experienced all of the things you're listing here as perks. I'd even say you likely get all that if you're in the 95th percentile of seniority and job stability among devs, or if we're talkin' about ten or fifteen years ago. Sounds like you're in one of those categories? Congrats. I'm not doing terribly myself either, albeit not quite that well. This always seems to be the argument. "How very privileged we are! Devs have so much going for us, we ought to be grateful! Clearly there is no reason we should collectively bargain." I dunno. I'm not into doing oppression olympics about my working conditions? There are still things that suck about how labor arrangements are in this profession, and this has become especially apparent during the recent multiple-year enormous layoff cycles in tech, and this is also indicative that we are, as a profession, perhaps losing some of the very scarcity-driven leverage that creates these conditions. Also, this kind of view really seems almost explicitly designed to buck solidarity with people who, in the same career path, don't have as many options as us, possibly because they are more junior or have nontraditional backgrounds or whatever. In fact, working conditions having high variance between devs for various reasons is one of the problems unions try to solve
- we, as tech workers, are losing out immensely due to a lack of collective bargaining
I look at the recent SAG-AFTRA strike as a reference: these are jobs with similarly privileged work conditions. However, there being a union meant they could inflict significant pain on industry players until their demands around AI training were met.
Meanwhile, we’re all just keeping our heads down hoping the market improves at the same time the biggest players are using our inputs to train even better models.
Just because our work conditions are better than other professions doesn’t negate the notion that we are being actively exploited to our own detriment.
This is true, but it's also true that any 12 year old kid with an ancient laptop on a random island in Indonesia will be proficient enough at writing code 4 years from now to take my job. There's no job security in big tech because it's a global marketplace. And it always will be.
> Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode"
Is it though? People in software seem to be constantly talking about burnout/mental health issues.
Like we need some explanation as to why software has such high pay, flexibility, limited education requirements, and yet not everyone in the world is doing it. High pay is usually a sign the job is compensating for being shitty in other ways.
> High pay is usually a sign the job is compensating for being shitty in other ways.
Or that it requires a set of skills that not everybody has, or that there is a competitive market where employees can select jobs based on pay. Those are two other reasons.
Indeed, I have to question the premise that high pay and shitty jobs go together. I can think of plenty of shitty, low-paid jobs.
I'd say there's a strong inverse correlation. Low-paid jobs are usually terrible in other ways too. Well-paid jobs are usually nice.
High pay means that the person creates a lot of value and that there's low supply relative to demand. High pay is offered because employers want to attract workers. If they're paying well, they're probably going to try other things to attract workers as well, such as offering better working conditions.
Low pay means you don't have to try too hard to get workers. That means you don't have to be nice to them.
It's nice when someone explains capitalism calmly without being overtly pro- or anti-. The world needs more clear explanations of how things work, and fewer opinions.
I don't think we should assume that teenagers being able to self-teach something makes those skills "easy".
When we hear stories like those the reaction tends to be "damn that must be a really smart kid".
I don't see any reason why equally smart kids couldn't teach themselves medicine, just as many professional sports players, artists, musicians, mathematicians, etc, tend to start playing from a very young age.
Some external differentiators seem to be "access to learning materials" and "regulation of access to a profession". As an example for that second point: there is absolutely a level of professional and personal maturity I expect from a doctor, that I don't expect the tech industry to screen for. Though I'm also not suggesting the current student -> doctor pipeline is ideal either.
It may be cheaper to learn, but the volume of knowledge you need at your fingertips and the ability to synthesize it to make good decisions is not necessarily less for a highly competent 28 year old tech worker who started coding at 12 than it is for a 28 year old doctor who started medical school at 22.
Self-teaching is also possible and a common route for auto mechanics, who make about as much as tech workers. They know how to do things that both doctors and SWEs are willing to pay for. Can your doctor rebuild his own car engine?
When I explain my job to people, I usually compare it to being an auto mechanic, not a doctor. That is what most software engineering boils down to. And in fact, our paths are converging with mechanics.
One thing about software dev is it’s hard to do very well but pretty easy to do good enough. It’s when good enough becomes no longer acceptable all of a sudden that the job gets very hard and people get burned. That’s not always fair though. Another interesting part of software dev is expectations change radically. I’m not in construction but I don’t think a developer can ask a construction team to build a skyscraper in 6 months vs a year or be fired and be taken serious but in software dev that happens all the time.
You're under-estimating how easy it is to do good enough. During the dot com boom many people with academic degrees in various fields tried to move over to software development with very limited success. That's like the top few % of the population to start with. Only some tiny fraction of those were in the good enough to successful range and many were ejected from the market when it crashed to never come back.
Being good at acquiring fancy academic degrees != Being good at programming.
If you ask the top 1% of FAANG engineers, the Jeff Dean's and Ken Thompsons to try to make it as professional ballet dancers, they're probably going to fail pretty hard too.
Granted "academic degrees" and "programming" are probably more similar than "programming" and ballet, but still.
The metaphor "ballet dancer" and "basketball player" or "basketball player" and "gymnast" might be more apt. You can be good at one thing and not good at a related thing, even if both require 'using your brain a lot' or 'using your body a lot'
I was working as a software developer before I got a degree. You're missing my point though.
Academic degrees and programming are a lot more similar than programming and ballet. People who got engineering and science degrees, as a population, are going to be more likely to become software engineers vs. the general population. This seems like a pretty obviously true claim. It's not a claim that people without degrees can't be software engineers. That's a pretty large population and I am a counter-example. My point is even within a population of people who in theory are more likely to become good, and who have had some motivation and invested time, it often does not work.
If anyone could program then we wouldn't be getting paid what we are. The reason why random people aren't all competing for our programming jobs isn't that our jobs are the worst. There are much worse jobs that people are competing over.
EDIT: and by the way, athletes in general do much better than the non-athlete population even in areas very dissimilar to the current sport.
Pay like other things is something you mentally calibrate to. Once you have then it has only marginal impact on your happiness and mental well-being. Let's say your TC is $120k or $80k or even $250k you're going to adjust your lifestyle to this. So sure, you can drive a nicer car and live in a nicer place for $250k but now you also maybe have to make payments on your nicer car and your nicer house and those things may not make you any happier.
Not everyone in the world is doing it - because not everyone can do it and not everyone is motivated to get to the point where they can do it, even if they could.
I live in the US, and according to what I read online, I am severely underpaid. The thing is, I don't really care. I have almost 9 years of experience, and I haven't even broke $100k yet. I work in government (state level), so it's not known for being high paying in the first place. There are other benefits, of course.
Nonetheless, I would obviously take more money, if offered, but I don't feel the need to frantically run around in the rat-race for it. I seriously cannot imagine what more money would do for me. I already feel like I make plenty just to push buttons on a keyboard.
I got my first software job while I was still in high school and when I started my career I mostly worked jobs that I really enjoyed for a lot less than I could potentially make otherwise. I didn't have a family yet, I didn't have a lot of expenses, I didn't care. Later down the road I joined a "real" startup and started getting paid much better (coincidentally or not around the time I had my first child) and since then I've sort of been in the rat race so to speak. Can't complain though but most of my later jobs were not as fun as my earlier ones.
Both you and this post can be correct. It is the case that being a software dev is a position of relative privilege. It is also the case that many people feel burnt out, the system doesn't support them, and labor solidarity is important. This is a classic trap. Just because your body isn't being abused by the system to the extent that others are doesn't mean that you can't argue and fight against the abuse you are suffering from.
This is true and not at all. Last year, I quit my job, because I was in the process of getting a burn-out. It was primarily because management refused to give me recognition for my efforts. (I dreamed about it last night.)
While I was unemployed, I did voluntairy work at a farming coop, physical labour, often simple weeding. Working there for just one morning per week felt more rewarding than working as a SWE. You could always see the results of your work with your own eyes.
> In some (e.g., medical careers), grind is not optional
Not disagreeing with your post in general, but the grind for medical specialists is only until 30 something. Once you are “consultant” (in Australia), it’s basically huge money with a job for life at whatever hours you want to work; almost anywhere in the world.
Don’t get me wrong, the grind until then is extreme, but it’s a weird comparison to make.
Overall, I agree that we are super privileged in the world of software.
You can have the most privileged occupation and bargain to make it better. Its not different from living in the USA, the wealthiest country in the world, and bargaining to make it better.
Generally, you change something you are a part of, not because its the most important thing in the world, but because you have a stake in it and understand it.
If your boss is constantly pressuring you to take on more work, then burnout is not a career choice. Ever have a coworker leave and get all their work dumped on you? Do your deadlines no longer allow time to relax and explore new ideas inbetween them? Managers all read the same magazines/blogs on how to get more out of their employees and it always seems to come down to beating the employees until they die, same as in the slave days. If you're not being pushed to do more, consider yourself lucky and stay there!
I don't think this rings true anymore for a lot of people, even those with "good experience."
It's a lot harder to even get interviews now--I'm one of several people in my social circle that are having difficulty even getting interviews with referrals.
Projecting forward, things looks worse than the present and far worse than the past.
I've notice that many engineers that have been inside cushy corporations for a while don't realize the bloodbath that is happening outside their corporate walls in the job markets. But your CEO definitely realizes it and they are tightening the screws because they haven't had this much power over employees in a long time. They're coming for you too sooner or later.
Okay. Reality check mate. It was like that till before COVID. Don’t be under the wrong assumption that it’s anything like that now, or ever will be. Maybe your experience was different? I can sure as hell relate to this and I’m not even in the valley.
This applies to some people (it certainly applies to me!) but not to everyone. Insofar as any white collar worker can be exploited, which they can, plenty of SWEs are making <$100k, work long hours, have poor healthcare, etc. etc.
And even for those who are doing well -- isn't it better to stand alongside those who aren't? Why is the "proper" thing to do just going your own way and being happy that you got yours?
"I moved from academia over a decade ago, and I know the difference"
Pressures are different indeed, but let's not pretend academia of all places is any less "priviledged"
Btw, most professors age well into retirement. Trying to find a software engineer over 55 is looking for a needle in a haystack that definitely will not make it past the next boom/bust cycle.
Agism in this field is endemic, probably the worst of any in knowledge work.
1000% this. My partner is in the medical field, the absurd schedule they put up with and the amount they are required to work when tired is the worst. Some close friends do contracting / construction, it takes a tole on their bodies.
People that take above senior level roles or "FANG" jobs should expect to grind.
Just because doctors have internalized the propaganda that they need to work that hard doesn't make it true or correct.
People who take senior roles are paid for the things they are accountable for. They don't have to do 80 hours in front of a screen, they need to drive outcomes and be accountable.
I feel like being a dev has taken a toll on my body in the opposite direction ---- "use it or lose it."
Perhaps it's because my brain is full of software issues itself, but I don't have enough energy nor motivation before/after work to do anything else. Luckily, I am somehow healthy-ish in terms of medical metrics, but I know at my current trajectory, I won't be able to sustain it for many more years.
Energy and motivation are irrelevant. Discipline is all that matters. Go out and do a hard workout every day no matter how tired you are or how miserable it makes you. Eventually it will just become a habit.
I think about doing this sometimes, and then I think how ironic it would be if I died next week and my last thought was I wish I'd spent those hours sleeping late, eating, drinking and fucking.
I've worked both senior level and FANG jobs and I did not expect to, nor did I, grind. Some of my colleagues have though out of necessity and I do not want them to be in a position where this is expected of them.
>In many professions, quitting means the end of a career - or at least a serious setback; in tech, it means getting many messages on LinkedIn.
That was the case a few years ago, when interest rates were 0 or below 0 and during the pandemics when IT experienced a boom.
I was layed off a the start of the year and it took two months to get some offers. It was much harder to find employment than 3 years ago. I went through more than 150 applications and tens of interviews.
I recommend this reading about where the valley heading. If you are not squeezed for work, you will be. Developers are becoming more disposable. Maybe you are not feeling but it's happening.
> Or take a gap year to regenerate, or reinvent, yourself.
I'm curious about people who have done this and how they've handled things like insurance, taxes, and getting back into the workforce after such a long gap. It seems like a big risk since there's no guarantee of employment. I'd also imagine having a long break would be looked on unfavorably by interviewers and make it harder to get back in
I can only speak for myself but I took 4 times a year or more off. Three of those times I spent backpacking and traveling in Australia, NZ and South-East Asia, and I spent time doing something else such as fruit-picking and working as a Dive Master and scuba diving for half a year. (Best times really)
Getting back to work was as simple as making a few phone calls essentially and exploring my network. Granted, it was a different time (decades ago) and I didn't look for a mega corp job that requires arduous interview process.
Since then when changing jobs and interviewing I've only ever been asked once about those "gaps" in my resume and I said that I took time off to travel and explore and was greeted with enthusiasm only.
You do realize that this is immensely privileged and something that 99% of working devs can't do right? Especially the bit about making calls and instantly getting a job, that's something even famous engineers can't get too.
If you have worked at a few companies and left on good terms, it shouldn't be that hard to contact them so you can go back. Otherwise, previous co-workers will be able to help out as well.
Many developers have no authority on who is hired at the company they work at or even who allowed to be interviewed for that matter, this is where your privilege comes in.
I took 2 years off where I made 0 income. Insurance was covered by the government and my healthcare was quite good. I didn't pay taxes because I didn't make any income. Getting back into the workforce happened literally within a single day (this was ~4 years ago when the market was different, not sure the same thing would happen now). I had no trouble switching jobs multiple times afterwards, either—recruiters and interviewers have never seemed to care that I took a break.
I was able to take some much needed time off to focus on personal projects and I'm extremely grateful I was able to do it.
My friends who didn't take time off were able to advance more in their careers, but I think it is a fair trade.
It's highly circumstantial depending on the person. I'm a better person for the challenges I'm facing, but I don't recommend it. I'd rather be compensated for the code I write.
I'm not a fan of the original post, but this is absurd and offensive. You're taking the creme-de-la-creme of tech workers and comparing them to medical interns. "Playing life in easy mode"? Would you say that an MD who chooses to specialize in, say, dermatology, and ends up the head of a department, and spends a lot of their 50s golfing, has lived life in easy mode? Probably not, because as you explained, grind is not optional to get to an optimal point in one's career.
Is it privileged to be able to live in a society where you can develop your career and not, like, have to go pick crops for three months? Yeah. Does the geographical freedom of SWEs (in a minority of cases) exceed that of a higher-paid traveling nurse? Sure, but that's a trade-off; the engineer takes less money than the nurse, but gets to travel further.
I'm not asserting that your comment was offensive because I'm whining about global systems of grind and exploitation. It's offensive because you seem to think that no one in the tech industry outside AAA game dev has come up from the mines. I started my career as an unpaid intern, then made $7.50/hr and freelanced on the side. I worked 12-16 hour days coding, and/or 8 hour days while doing 8 hour shifts as a waiter and taxi driver. So now, 30 years later, I can bill $300/hr and work a few hours a day. Is that easy mode?
And if you're referring to the people half my age who are trying to make it in this industry, they have it much harder than I did. They're living after the time when they can specialize and be adopted in as part of the technical debt for clients or companies. They have virtually no chance at job security. They have to constantly scrape and invent in order to stay relevant. So yes, people like me may appear to have easy lives compared with 24 year old medical students, but you seem to be taking for granted the lateral shift in your career - I suppose it's probably easier mucking with python than writing academic papers - but you're taking for granted your status, age, job security, etc. And missing the fact that other people do not get into this industry because it's easy, but rather because they are up for a challenge.
And how many people have said that working in academia is playing life in easy mode? That's the joke of the century.
> How many of us have been forced to work on projects that make us sick to our stomachs - surveillance tech, data mining tools, algorithms that reinforce social biases - because we don’t have the power to say no?
Those unprivileged people that you're trying to compare tech workers to, in order to undermine this manifesto, are exactly those who are harmed by dark patterns.
Anyway that's besides the point. Your profile says "Co-founder and CTO" which means you are biased against unions. Your comments cannot be taken at face value, because you are incentivized to come up with any reason to side against this movement.
> How many of us have been forced to work on projects that make us sick to our stomachs - surveillance tech, data mining tools, algorithms that reinforce social biases - because we don’t have the power to say no?
This is also a point that is not only in the range of "lack of perspective" but actively dishonest. Yes, you can say "no," - which is not true for occupations with codified career paths (medicine, academia, law, military) and all jobs in which you literally cannot afford 2 months to search for a job.
I turned down quite a few offers in markets that (according to my beliefs) I feel are harming the world. Yes, it means turning down offers with 2x salary. Just because there is a temptation does not mean we must follow it.
> Your profile says "Co-founder and CTO" which means you are biased against unions
Bolt to assume that.
I had a start-up for 2.5 years. Before that (and now), I worked freelance consulting and contract work.
In any case, I am based in Europe and believe in the European approach to social security, healthcare, free education, and minimal wage. I vote for parties that opt for higher taxes to support such.
Incredible that people like you will watch the industry lay off hundreds of thousands of workers then turn around and make this argument. It's like devs are allergic to any semblance of labor solidarity.
> It's like devs are allergic to any semblance of labor solidarity.
No, it's because we know how good we have it. Yes tech layoffs can be brutal but we all signed up for that. I knew even back in college that tech jobs can be flaky and I was likely to be out on my ass a few times in career. But I took the deal anyways because I can make six figures wearing pajamas in my basement.
And yet they're so massive that them all doing layoffs at the same time despite that profitability has a huge impact on the labor market of the while industry.
If someone produces less effort than they cost, it's reasonable to fire them even if the organization as a whole is profitable. That's probably not what the FAANG companies did, but layoffs are not unjustifiable for profitable companies.
Your employer doesn’t need you to buy food or pay for a roof over their head.
You need your employer to stay fed and housed.
There is a lot more downside for you than your employer, thus a massive power asymmetry. The only way to restore the balance is solidarity between workers and it’s usually a union (or a guild)
I don't need my employer for that either, because they're competing for my labor in a market with many other employers. It would be extremely costly to replace me because of the critical role I have on a highly profitable product. If anything, I'm the one with leverage, which I use every year to request more pay, fancier titles, and larger responsibilities.
Realistically, if I were laid off today I'd likely land a better paying job than this one. I choose to stay because I like my boss, my work, and my coworkers.
If circumstances changed such that it made sense to lay me off then I should be laid off. Why should anyone be obligated to pay my salary if I'm not offering commensurate value?
Get some financial discipline and arrange an emergency fund covering at least 6 months of expenses. It's amazing how much less leverage your employer is able to exert if you can make good on a threat of leaving.
Why does that bother you though? I couldn't care less about how others work as long as they're not actively detrimental to everyone else. Hell, the managerial and C-suites are the ones that impact people the most negatively most of the time, yet we're complaining about someone who's got actual bills to pay for doing their job and not killing themselves over it.
The bare minimum is what everyone should be doing, because nobody owes their employers more than that
It leads to scrum culture, because you need accountability for the people that aren’t self-motivated enough to proceed with work without extrinsic motivation (their ideal situation is nothing to do but still get paid).
That’s my theory anyway. Previously the assumption seems to have been that the nerd was gonna nerd, and the only thing you sometimes needed to do was reign them in.
Academia is a much easier, low productivity, self-interested career than engineering in my experience. Most academics claim they work hard but have very poor time management and work intensely in short periods whilst taking huge amounts of holiday and flexible time off. Most universities are empty during the summer months. Even at top tier universities in the UK I was shocked how absent people were around anything remotely close to a holiday period.
In the commercial world you have to sing for your supper, as PG put it, and that is much much harder.
Eh, most of the benefits are offset by the stress of having to care about the needs of corporate america and all the ensuing implications of making a living by destroying society. Just because it's not a physical job doesn't mean this stress won't kill you.
It's also worth noting that developers remain some of the most proportionately under-compensated jobs compared to the revenue we drive and we're all aware of it. It's the shareholders that need to justify their existence.
> But let's not paint ourselves, members of one of the most privileged occupations, as victims of the global system.
Everyone can be victims of the "global system" at the same time, even if not to equal degrees.
I live in Latvia. Teachers here are underpaid. So are firefighters. So are nurses. So are software developers, compared to most other countries, or even with what people could historically afford on a single salary. The economy could be worse, but it also kinda sucks for everyone.
Using housing prices as a quick example:
> U.S. home prices are rising significantly faster than incomes. After accounting for inflation, home prices jumped 118% from 1965 to 2021, while income had only increased by 15%.
> Between 2010 and the third quarter of 2023, house prices increased by 48% and rents by 22%. When comparing the third quarter of 2023 with 2010, house prices increased more than rents in 18 out of the 27 EU countries.
> Over this period, house prices more than tripled in Estonia (+210%) and more than doubled in Hungary (+185%), Lithuania (+158%), Latvia (+141%), Austria (+123%), Czechia (+122%) and Luxembourg (+107%). Decreases were observed in Greece (-14%, see methodological notes), Italy (-8%) and Cyprus (-2%).
> Rents increased in 26 EU countries with the highest rises in Estonia (+218%), Lithuania (+170%) and Ireland (+100%). The only decrease in rent prices was recorded in Greece (-20%). Latvia's rent increase was more modest than its house price increase at around 50%.
> According to Money.com.au, house prices have skyrocketed nationally by 3435 per cent since 1975 compared with just 1183 per cent growth in full-time wages.
Seems pretty global, same with the prices of various goods being more or less out of control, education costs, healthcare costs, everything. It doesn't mean that my profession isn't privileged in many ways, I still try to help my friends when I can.
And even in the USA they are not. I never work more than 40 hours, have ample time off, and am never under very much stress at work. If things don't get done today, well they will be there tomorrow. Now granted, I don't make the money that I used to make at a 60+ hour a week startup with weekends and all-nighters not uncommon. But it's worth it, and it's still enough to live on comfortably.
Some of you are outing yourselves as not having any real world, let's just call them... issues.
>as victims of the global system.
You know if I were to be REALLY generous and take your statements in good-faith, that still wouldn't change the fact that injustice is injustice. Being murdered is not the same thing as having your wallet stolen, but that doesn't mean you should throw up your hands with a thought-terminating cliche and go "well it could have been worse! Guess I should just let them have it and not do any follow up!"
It is possible to simultaneously be a victim of the system and for other people to be worse off victims of the system.
All workers can and should unite to protect themselves from the capitalist class. Tech professionals should not feel guilty merely because they are less oppressed than the other workers.
> Don't get me wrong - I am all for criticism of grind and exploitation. But let's not paint ourselves, members of one of the most privileged occupations, as victims of the global system.
Not having it as bad as others is not the same as not being a victim. We really need to drop this attitude because it misaligns our loyalties with those who have no reason to be loyal to us in return. It's a false consciousness.
Wealth and income are widely pushed as "class" distinctors in culture and media for a reason. They blur the lines and mislead us about our place in the system. Yes, many software jobs pay handsome salaries for now. But as soon as they can, companies will drop those salaries and cut those jobs because we're a cost center, even if the "assets" we create pad out the balance sheet more than a cleaner or receptionist could.
Wealth can enable you to become an enterpreneur which in turn can enable you to become part of the billionaire class if you make it through all of the filters against all the odds. But even small business owners are only a few bad months (or in the US maybe even just one bad health event) away from the rest of us plebs, unless they are so tightly integrated (which almost always means family, i.e. something outside their control) that they can get the support to recover.
We're all suffering from grind and exploitation. Some of us suffer more directly but just having lucked into a position so far ahead from the bulldozer chasing us that you can't see it, doesn't mean it won't run you over if you have to stop or fall and can't get up in time. That bulldozer exists by choice. You didn't get a say in it, nor did I, but that doesn't mean its existence is inevitable or unchangeable. Capitalism isn't a law of nature any more than feudalism was. Nor does capitalism have to evolve (and it has evolved, likely even within your lifetime) into something better, especially if those at the receiving end of it are placated by being told that others having it worse.
The author seems to think that everybody works this way. In reality, many of us work 40-45 hour weeks with no on call and low amounts of meetings. These jobs are in the boring (military, banking, insurance etc) sectors but I make a good, not great, living.
I work at a FANG. Senior SDE. I don't have slack on my phone. I don't read emails (unless someone tells me out of band that one needs a response). Once I close this laptop work is dead to me until the following day.
You pick and choose your own involvement. I'm "passionate" about the job. I consider it a craft and a lifelong pursuit. I'm writing a book on the topic. But the job is just a job. I'm here because they give me money. That's where my obligation ends. I do have to do oncall rotations, and it sucks, but I mark that up to "what the money is for."
My only point being, one of these rants makes it to the front page every few months. "Unionize" gets thrown around. People complain as though it must be done. I've only worked 2 legit 80 weeks in my life. I decided I didn't like it, so I stopped doing it.
That means I cannot compete inside of this place with the people that work non-stop, live on slack, and devote their lives to their job. And that's OK. They can have the Top Tier rating and the salary that comes with it. I prefer to just make my little slice of the world good during the hours that I'm paid to do it. Then I go do something else.
Exactly. Google even explicitly says that T4 is a terminal level, i.e. they're happy to pay you a high salary for 40 hours per week of protobuf copying and the occasional design doc.
> I'm here because they give me money. That's where my obligation ends.
This is reality, but we are expected to serve like dancing monkeys jumping through hoops to make up some cult-like zeal-for-productivity story to get through the interview.
He seems to have solved a mindset issue that eludes others like myself.
I reduced to 24hr billable hours a week thinking that it would help with burnout. Instead my ego is constantly deflated given that I am now the least productive developer on the team given all others work 40hrs+ and my meeting/coding ratio has become unbearable. The resulting competition anxiety ensures I think about the project all the time. The resulting lack of energy has affected my other projects/interests.
This is 100% in my head as my supervisor is happy with my output. But I can't escape it. I often lie down, stare at the ceiling for answers, only to find myself in a worse state.
The author is clear that they're talking about "billion dollar tech companies" for an audience of those people called to them.
You're right that these are not the only place that people can write software and that many of us have recognized for a very long while that these are noxious places to write software, or that they were eventually going to become so.
Billion dollar FAANGs and their smaller, cargo culting, shadows represent a certain sector with a certain work atmosphere, much as game development companies and hedge/trading firms do. 15 years ago, during the ascent of Facebook and Google, this atmosphere was different than it is now -- innovative and luxurious and inviting -- and some people still look see them through the lens of the past, but they're much larger machines now, with different priorities and incentive structures, and as the author notes, those are mostly not aligned with sustainable, satisfying, or healthy environments for most of the engineers who've found themselves inside of them.
Like finance, they pay extremely well, and like games, they can make you feel like you're part of something you can brag about at a dinner party, but also like both, they have little concern about chewing you up for as long as you're willing to bear it.
I strongly do not think that things like 80 hour weeks, abuse, uncaring managers, and especially AGILE of all things are super common at FAANG. If you join a startup (in any industry) I think there's an understanding that you will probably work over 40 hours a week and that things will generally be hectic. Many companies will openly advertise this and tell you if you ask.
I really found myself wondering who the audience was for this. The person who works hard, produces quality engineering artifacts, and DOESN'T have options at other companies? I don't think that person exists?
I have friends who are extremely smart where this is not the case. Some of them didn't know other options were available. Some did not have the bandwidth to interview.
> The author is clear that they're talking about "billion dollar tech companies" for an audience of those people called to them.
> We’re in an industry where burnout isn’t just common - it’s expected. If you’re not pulling all-nighters, you’re "not committed." If you’re not answering Slack messages at midnight, you’re "not a team player." This culture is toxic, and it’s only getting worse. The relentless churn of projects, the constant pressure to innovate, and the ever-present threat of obsolescence create a perfect storm of stress.
No, the author is generalizing what work at a billion dollar tech company is like to the whole industry. I've never worked for a company similar to the one described in this post, and I think that the vast majority of people in tech haven't either. Silicon valley is not the world.
Yeah that was my take away. I don't doubt there are many company cultures like that, and you see many highly influential tech bros advocate for it. But in my ~15 year career, most of my burnout was due to lack of progress and politics, not 80+ hour work weeks.
Now, I didnt make enough to retire in this time, but same as you I do just fine in a very high cost of living state. I've always planned my career to be 30+ years and optimized for that. I have no interest in working at a place where I'll make a million+ a year in exchange for my personal ethics and life. I want to retire and be able to actually enjoy it.
> I want to retire and be able to actually enjoy it.
In hindsight the goal of retirement seems so weird.
Nobody can save their time into an account (your hours of life cannot be transferred). I have many friends that died before 65, or I know retirees with health issues that severely interfere with enjoyment of life.
In theory we can save money by investing for later (money ≠ time). In practice I strongly believe our governments will steal our investments... Demographics suggest that governments will go broke and so governments will take what whatever they can.
I'm in New Zealand and there are clear signals to me that retirement savers will get rug-pulled by our government (changes to age/$ thresholds, but also other various taxation suggestions). A government cannot reduce spending because either (1) voters don't like that or (2) other powerful beneficiaries {businesses, politicians} fight against it.
Background: I chose bootstrapped startup life in my 30s and got a small success by 50 and I'm now possibly retired. I wished I had payed more attention to what retirees actually do because previously I understood little.
I think unions need to work on their marketing. I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems."
What's the A+ example out there of a unionized engineering team that has been able to find a great work-life balance, great benefits, and a fun product development life-cycle that is profitable or clearly on its way to profitability? Show me this company.
I have family and friends who work for airline unions, parcel unions, teacher unions, etc. Some love it, some hate it. Those who love it had a broken fan in the van all summer with no air conditioning until the union stepped in. How would a union meaningfully improve that situation at a tech office with paid lunches and decent benefits?
Like, the promise of a better tomorrow from unions carries the same tone as a promise to IPO "really soon" from the CEO/CFO tag team at the annual kick-off meeting. What does it look like when rubber meets the road?
The issue is the idea that there’s something that can magically solve all your problems. If you believe in panaceas, everything will disappoint you.
Unions are a tool, and tools have tradeoffs. They will be able to solve some of your problems — most importantly, the power imbalance between employer and employee — and introduce new ones you didn’t have before. The bet is that if we collectively use unions correctly, they will solve more problems than they create; that we will, on balance, be better off.
Let’s take the NYT Tech Guild. They negotiated a new contract following a strike last November. Here are some of the things they won:
> Enhanced job security with ‘just cause’ protections
> Guaranteed wage increases for the first time of up to 8.25% (plus additional base rate discretionary compensation) that prioritize the largest wage increases for the lowest paid members over the life of the contract
> Additional compensation for on-call work
> Important protections that lock in guardrails on additional variable compensation (including stocks and bonuses)
> Improved protections for workers on visas
> Language guaranteeing flexible hybrid work schedules
> Process and transparency protections related to career growth, performance reviews and other workplace issues
As a fairly progressive news outlet attracting staff with certain sensibilties in the NYC area and selling views to people who are the same, the NYTimes board of directors has a vested PR interest in tolerating unions with the large amounts money they have to pay for the privilege. I'm not convinced the company is better served by unionized employees over the rest of the tech scene, which has to innovate to stay solvent.
Knowing someone in tech there who refused to join the union, I was told these guys aren't particularly the best or smartest colleagues she's ever worked with to put it mildly.
> The National Labor Relations Board rejected the New York Times’ attempt to stop the election, alleging the bargaining unit was improper. The company had previously declined to voluntarily recognize the union and immediately began holding anti-union captive audience meetings with workers.
> The NewsGuild of New York filed a complaint earlier this month with the NLRB, accusing the Times of violating federal labor law by adding new paid days off to the company holiday calendar for non-union employees only – which was viewed as a tactic to dissuade workers from voting for the union.
> After the complaint was filed, the New York Times made similar changes to its bereavement policy, making it applicable only to non-union workers. The union is collecting signatures as part of a public petition demanding the New York Times stop what it calls union-busting.
> On 5 January, the NLRB filed a complaint against the Times, ruling the company violated federal labor law by telling some employees they could not show support for tech workers seeking to unionize.
It’s funny how you have hard facts backed by citation, and the other poster has nothing but vibes and anecdotes. I don’t know if you convinced him, but you certainly make a compelling case for everyone else reading this exchange.
Forgive me if this is an overly-simplistic question – I'm a student, so there is a lot I don't know and this seems to be a complex topic, but I ask this in good faith: if the people that are members of the union are happy with it, what negative outcome is produced so as to make the union a bad solution?
From what I understand, the basic purpose of a union is to give its members more collective negotiating power with the employer. Its purpose isn't to better serve the company, necessarily, but to give the employees a more effective means of having their needs met – if employees feel these needs aren't being met, negotiating and making an agreement collectively could be a more effective route. Its job is to change the power dynamic between employees and companies, in favor of the employees. If this is the case, and the NYTimes tech staff who are union members like the outcome unionizing has had, then how is it a bad solution? What would be a better alternative of meeting the employees' needs?
I recognize my understanding is probably incomplete; I write this comment not to defend this position on unions, but to learn why it may be wrong.
A general problem is it can make the industries less competitive and the companies struggle as work moves elsewhere. See the history of Detroit for example.
> Knowing someone in tech there who refused to join the union, I was told these guys aren't particularly the best or smartest colleagues she's ever worked with to put it mildly.
Hackernews poster go 5 minutes without insulting your peers challenge: impossible.
I made $450k TC in my last job. In Atlanta. I don't think we need unions to be treated well.
Unions will kickstart the offshoring of our career. Just like every other place unions exist without a talent monopoly (manufacturing, automotive, and most recently film crews).
Google is going to hire in developing markets and stop hiring domestically. Everyone else will follow. The talent in India is incredible these days. You can't knock them or call them less talented than US engineers. They're rock solid. And there are lots of other talented worldwide markets for software engineering.
Without antitrust action from the DOJ/FTC, big tech will continue to crush domestic startups too or create a ceiling for how large they can grow in our market.
And if unions lead to offshoring happening, we're fucked.
1. Tech workers are currently treated as well as (or better than) we would be without unions.
2. Unions would cause companies to offshore jobs to developing markets with similar talent.
If unions don't increase worker compensation, why would they cause companies to offshore jobs? Conversely, if companies could acquire comparable talent in emerging markets for less money, why aren't they doing that already?
† Or, rather, they could be, but it would mean companies leaving a lot of money on the table out of the goodness of their hearts.
Wake up. Engineers in other countries are just as good as we are. The only reason we don't hire remote is that the business functions here keep the same hours.
You throw unions into the mix and suddenly dealing with the time difference becomes the lesser evil.
I suppose "treated well" is kinda nebulous. Personally, I'd say it encompasses job security, so if unions make it hard to fire people then they are improving treatment of workers.
I’m sorry, but you must not be paying attention to the current climate. To name one example, Facebook just laid off many workers and explicitly labeled them “low performers”.
Tech companies have already been caught colluding to suppress wages. They are sending as many jobs as they can overseas, and bringing in even more h1b workers.
It is clear to anyone that’s paying attention that they are doing their best to damage our negotiating position so that they no longer have to treat us well (read: fairly)
>If unions don't increase worker compensation, why would they cause companies to offshore jobs?
Because unions are a headache for management to deal with and that headache is much worse than compensation, which is a budget-line item, and doesn't personally impact anyone in management.
The AWU, for e.g, has political goals that represent what a small minority of Alphabet employees want but end up being a pain in a for anyone to deal with.
I assure you that management tracks budget-line items very closely, especially when they are the largest one (as is the case at almost all software companies).
> Unions will kickstart the offshoring of our career
People are offshoring right now, and increasingly so. A union is arguably one of the only tools left to prevent offshoring, short of government intervention.
how would that work? Maybe the current force is protected, but if there is no new US hires, then teams will slowly shift due to people retiring or leaving.
"sorry, no more open positions in the US... but don't worry, you are getting some helpers from India!"
There are simple location-based reasons why jobs wouldn't be offshored- longshoremen, electricians and plumbers, flight attendants (for USA based airlines), and also the NYT tech staff are unlikely to be offshored.
I'm still not sure that unions don't make sense for tech- it seems like the idea that tech workers need protection from their employers is gaining ground.
I also think there are still a lot of reasons why unions don't make sense.
> also the NYT tech staff are unlikely to be offshored
I agree with most of your list, but not this one. Tech staff is one of the easiest jobs to offshore. It has been happening since the early 2000s in the US to lower cost locations (mostly India, the others later). Is there anything special about the NYT tech staff that makes them less likely to be offshored?
But with tech unions, situations like the parent's become non-existent because individuals can't negotiate for themselves.
I've been in three different unions in my life. All three exploited me. All three were in the employer's pocket. All three unfairly distributed the work so that the union rep and their friends got the easiest work and the best pay. All three made sure I was paid the minimum.
My computer skills are what finally allowed me to punch my own ticket. I'll be damned if I hand that power back over to someone else.
Unions lead to an ossified workforce where nobody does more than what is essential. New employees are jealous of tenured employees with more benefits. Once people get tenure, they'll take advantage of their status. This leads to lower productivity, not higher productivity.
Without a union, you have people fighting to show their seniority and leadership at every level. The top 10% naturally sort themselves out. And the take home typically correlates with that.
Union jobs get easier and cushier with tenure.
Non-union jobs get harder the more you want from the job, but you are in control of your career progression and comp. And the strongest rise to the top.
Switching jobs or unions will fuck with seniority, dues, etc., so it will become a factor in choosing jobs. It will likely lead to many more "lifers" who work at a single job for a long time. This leads to less knowledge and skill mobility, tighter code ownership (less fungible, less exposed to new ideas), and this will certainly lead to ossification of organizations and business functions.
Businesses are probably more afraid of unions than they are high compensation.
> Unions lead to an ossified workforce where nobody does more than what is essential.
> It will likely lead to many more "lifers" who work at a single job for a long time. This leads to less knowledge and skill mobility, tighter code ownership (less fungible, less exposed to new ideas), and this will certainly lead to ossification of organizations and business functions.
Funny, you just described basically every large company I have ever worked at. None of them were really unionized (one did have a union but it was very small).
I work in a data center with electricians, tower climbers, and systems and network engineers. ALL of us are blue collar. Including me, a systems/network engineer. I suggest you investigate this aspect of tech — there’s more to it than VS Code and JavaScript
Data Center and Operations people absolutely are blue collar in attitude and mindset, but you DC folks get to be isolated.
If you're in a working environment that hires SDEs straight out of Tier 1 Universities, start talking about what it's like to grow up poor and you'll see quickly how everyone's eyes glaze over and you get treated like a pariah.
Kickstarter only voted 97.6% after absolutely bitter internal conflicts and a semi-forced exodus of people who weren't on board with the plan. The in-fighting was extremely bitter, extremely personal, included death-threats and I know several former Kickstarter employees on both sides of that mess who are in therapy over how that all went down.
Yeah but the question is "are there any examples where unions obviously helped the workers". You responded "blue collar unions", where there's a pretty common perception that they did help, but when it comes to white collar unions you can only come up with examples that aren't really known for having done anything. UAW isn't even white-collar.
The whole conversation is about the novelty and usefulness of something that doesn't exist in the mainstream. Those who are skeptical can eternally say "show me more examples". Maybe your critique isn't as useful as you think it is.
the "tech industry" is somehow totally isolated and completely different from all other types of labor in the history of the united states? how?
here's an answer i gave to this question downstream: "the Riot Games union is bargaining for better pay and less brutal working hours. at Blizzard they did employee walkouts, leading to better pay and changes in work culture. at Kickstarter they negotiated better remote work policies and reduction of discriminatory actions."
Why is tech not blue collar? Because you use your brain instead of your hands? You are closer to a plumber or an electrician than to Sergey Brin, griping that you should be working 60 hours a week to develop AI to replace you for Alphabet shareholders.
Doctors have unions [1] ("among actively practicing physicians, approximately 70,000 currently belong to a union, representing 8% of physicians" [2]), lawyers have essentially guilds. If your wealth is closer to Brin’s than the median, than you’re an outlier whom I would not expect to need nor value a union (congrats on your luck). Unions are for the median, not the very wealthy and lucky [3].
The median annual wage for physicians and surgeons in the US was $239,200 in 2023. In May 2023, the median annual wage for lawyers in the U.S. was $145,760, with the lowest 10% earning less than $69,760 and the highest 10% earning more than $239,200. Stats shamelessly stolen from the US BLS website.
We don’t have feathers in our caps. Blue, white, red, whatever - we are all resources working for the capitalists, and should try to learn whatever we can from each other.
So, why are there no major tech unions specifically? Tech is a “new” field (relatively speaking), is generally well paid, and comes with relatively better benefits compared to other fields. This is not something inherent to the field: it’s just a supply vs. demand thing combined with easy access to money (low rates, VCs, etc).
Unions will start to become more prominent as shit hits the fan for us tech workers. Because without a unifying threat, there is no realistic way to convince a bunch of people who are living relatively well to join forces - as demonstrated by this thread.
Unfortunately, the existence of a common threat is necessary imo but not sufficient (in the US at least), as we’ve witnessed over the past few years of layoffs and forced RTO.
The following is my personal experience being part of a collective bargaining union (OPSEU local 598), which encompassed a few hundred workers for Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, in Toronto Ontario, from 2007-2017. I worked in IT for the duration of my employment (although not all union members were IT - but a lot were.)
The good:
- An elected collective bargaining team negotiated for us every ~5 years, and came up with a collective bargaining agreement (CBA). This allowed the members to express their desires for what they wanted (although not all requests were brought up in bargaining, and had to be agreed to to be ratified), which were generally listened to
- On-call compensation was set out as part of that agreement, and was the most generous I've experienced in my 25+ year career.
- Members could file grievances with the union regarding work conditions, or unfair treatment of the workers (I don't recall hearing of this ever happening, but there were processes in place for it)
- Health benefits were good, if not the best I've seen
- You could get two pay bumps per year, one that all union members got that was set aside in the CBA, and another moving you up a spot in your pay band (but only if you were not at the top of your salary band)
The bad:
- Union dues, while not huge, were yet another noticeable deduction from each pay
- When at the top of your salary band, you only got the one cost of living adjustment per year. There was no automatic way of moving to the next salary band
- Getting promoted means applying for internally posted positions (which all employees can apply for), and successfully being hired in to that position. This is the only way to move up salary bands, and you could only move up one pay slot in the new band (as they overlapped between bands). This really limited upwards career growth, and meant that leaving the company was the only way to get double-digit pay increases (or move in to management, which was outside the union)
- Our CBA strangely didn't cover / prevent layoffs of staff (although other union CBAs certainly do - so this is just my own experience), so I was one of the 100+ members that were laid off when a new VP decided to outsource a bunch of our roles to Tata Consultancy Services in India. There were provisions in place given my seniority that would have made a more junior union members have to be laid off in place of me (so I could take over their role instead), however I opted to take my severance package as I was ready to move on.
So to summarize - unions are definitely a mixed bag in my experience. I can appreciate the good they can do (and different CBAs will result in wildly different experiences), but from what I've personally seen, they generally function to treat all workers in a similar way: not rewarding the best, and not really punishing the worst.
Are you working 7 days a week in horrific circumstances? Do you have children as your colleagues? No? That’s due to unions and labourers fighting for the rights you currently have.
IMO that's a pretty irrelevant example when it comes to today's tech unions and ignores the thrust of the commenter's question.
Yes, unions were responsible for changing the factory working culture in the past. But I know tons of people that work in tech jobs now that have to be some the cushiest jobs in the history of the planet. Yes, there is stress, not a lot of job security, and the standard corporate BS, but tech employees are generally paid quite well with great perks (obviously, depending on the company). The people who work at these companies aren't accidentally falling into vats at meat processing plants a la The Jungle, so unions need to convince them what the benefit would be to them now.
Unionization, mandatory schooling, and work-life balance are all collective outcomes of industrialization and urbanization. Claiming that one caused the other is silly oversimplification.
Heh, it terrifies me at times of how clueless of the past the general population is. We're already at the point in history where people like Bezos and Musk want to return to company cities with their own non-cash payment systems.
The 1800's were horrific. It was not the industrial revolution alone that made things better. People had to fight and die in the labor movement for better outcomes for us now.
Unbelievable that this had to be spelled out. Do people actually think that current working conditions and employee rights were bestowed upon us by benevolent capitalists?
When it comes to tech workers, not by benevolent capitalists, but by greedy capitalists.
Up until say 2022 or so, the vast majority of people who worked in tech companies in the US were compensated extremely well (relatively) without unions, the reason being that (a) modern tech, especially software, can be such a "force multiplier" where a small team of programmers can serve millions of customers and (b) there really is a huge difference in individual programmer capability, and in winner-take-all/most markets, capitalists were willing to pay outsized amounts for those they deemed higher quality workers (meaning able to create higher quality/better/faster etc. products).
We're at an inflection point now both with the general maturity of the Internet, and with AI, that the ability to capture huge parts of the market is less dependent on the skills of individual software engineers/product managers, etc. When you are less able to differentiate the quality of your labor against your peers, that is when unions become more desirable.
Only when this thread got sidetracked. The article and comment that started this thread are about tech industry unions. I can fully appreciate the role unions played by improving working conditions in the past and still come to the conclusion that I wouldn't want them for (most) tech industry workers now.
A quick read up on the history of the labor movement will show that it started because people didn't want to work 6 days a week, 12 hours a day in factories anymore.
Let me put it this way. If a rowing team spends their time infighting rather than coordinating, they’ll find it difficult to make progress even though they can in theory move very fast.
> What's the A+ example out there of a unionized engineering team that has been able to find a great work-life balance, great benefits, and a fun product development life-cycle that is profitable or clearly on its way to profitability? Show me this company.
I'd like to see unions negotiate better equity deals. For pre-IPO companies, it's typical that the equity is worth nothing, and employees can actually lose money on their equity by buying it during early exercise or when they leave. For a typical employee, equity is too risky and too detached from their individual activity to be part of compensation, and it makes more sense to have different incentives. E.g. SAFEs or convertible notes where you can get paid at the next funding round instead of the IPO between 10 years and never. Alternatively, a union would have leverage and scale to arrange tender offers that individuals wouldn't. Also, during an acquisition, the union can negotiate to waive liquidation preference, since an acquirer doesn't want to buy a company where the employees don't get paid and strike on the first day.
this is a great example of the kind of things unions should talk about when doing tech organizing.
too often, unions pitch themselves on fixing problems that are low on the hierarchy of needs in a particular job (e.g., will this job kill/maim you? do you make enough money to feed yourself?) and it just doesn't resonate with the types of problems that tech folks have.
but pre-IPO equity deals are something that all employees hate and are completely powerless to change as individuals.
I'd be particularly interested in cases where unionization led to better products and processes. Like in a world where management just wanted to ship everything half baked, the union gave the workforce the voice required to insist on accurate and up to date documentation, comprehensive testing, proper dependency tracking and security practices, etc.
I feel like almost everyone I talk to in tech says that behind the scenes, their company's development workflow is a nightmare, so this doesn't appear to be a problem that's fixing itself under market pressures.
We don't need software unions. We need to break up big tech.
Software companies should be able to hire and fire. We often need to have 24/7 oncall. Needs are flexible. Startups must be nimble.
It's the tech giants that are ruining it for everyone. They're preventing new centicorns from forming. They're forcing underpriced M&A for successes, moving into markets with infinite money and killing upstarts before they find legs. They own every platform, every discovery mechanism, and they tax more than governments do.
Big tech recently figured out they could pay off everyone and put pricing pressure back on the engineers that built their market position. Previously they were worried engineers could leave and start upstart competitors. That's why they hired everyone and paid top of band salaries. Now that they realize there is no governmental antitrust legislation to fear, they just crush everything.
They're in search of infinite growth, so they move into new markets like Hollywood movies and primary care doctors and undercut everyone. They market themselves for free at the top of their websites and app stores (or print giant ads on their delivery trucks and cardboard packaging). Things that would cost competitors hundreds of millions of dollars to do.
> Software companies should be able to hire and fire.
Almost every company in every industry makes this dubious claim. Then we rediscover the benefits of team knowledge and stability.
> We often need to have 24/7 oncall
This feels completely orthogonal to the discussion at hand, nobody is claiming that a union will somehow make doing on-call impossible. Many other professions that do have unions, have an on-call analog.
Forming the union is step one of a long road before you actually reap the benefits. It can take year(s) to negotiate the CBA with your employer. Sounds like fear of layoffs was a huge factor, but the employer must agree to those terms, and that remains to be seen. So for now that's all rhetoric. Show me a team that has gotten to the other side with these terms in a contract.
the Riot Games union is bargaining for better pay and less brutal working hours. at Blizzard they did employee walkouts, leading to better pay and changes in work culture. at Kickstarter they negotiated better remote work policies and reduction of discriminatory actions.
I think a lot of people might consider taking a pay cut in return for an easier tech job. In theory working in an equally profitable company by lowering stress and comp for everyone and hiring more seems possible, but I'm not certain that it'd work out in practice because of increased coordination overhead etc.,.
The union members (i.e., the employees) give that power to the "union boss." Not all unions work like that (some do not have a traditional union leader), and for those who do, having a powerful union leader can be a good or a bad thing, depending on who gets elected as the union leader by the union members.
One of the problems with real world union examples is all the laws that weakened and destroyed unions over the years. Even if there were few or no examples of thriving unions today because of issues with the legal regime, that does not strictly imply that better conditions are not possible. For example wildcat strikes and sympathy strikes have been illegal since 1947, putting more power in the hands of union management and taking power away from unions. That’s both unfair from a libertarian perspective (if workers want to strike there should not be a law preventing them from doing so) and it undermines the concept of worker power which unions otherwise aim to uphold.
So it may be instructive to look at past examples when unions were strong and compare the working conditions of workers in unions and workers not in unions. Or to look at unions in other countries like Germany where they have board seats and better legal accommodation.
Isn't that a function of living within hierarchies?
Can you describe a system of change where one person is not ultimately responsible for the changes?
Unions exist as a structure of power, but that power still has contend with company power. Good outcomes are proportional to challenging someone else's power, and people use their power to punish challengers and reward loyalists.
That means good outcomes, no matter what the system, are a function of pain tolerance and people's willingness to make sacrifices for the benefit of others. Unions are a higher leverage vehicle for making sacrifices, but if there is no tolerance for pain or sacrifice then your only option is submission and hoping those with more power than you use it responsibly rather than becoming increasingly more despotic.
Seems like a good time to unionize is when you don't need it, while the job is good. Get the union in place and work through issues like on-call, laying out actual articulable and measurable performance targets for review time, work-life balance rules and other "small" things while the job is good. That way when the money grubbing starts, the true horror-show policies are attempted, etc - you have an established union and a better bargaining position. Better than waiting until the job is shit and having to fight an uphill battle all the way.
i've recently been thinking about when in a start-ups lifecycle should employees consider unionizing.
it'd be great if a worker-friendly culture was instilled in the company from its earliest days, but i'm not sure if a) there's an effective minimum size needed to unionize or b) if the existence of a union would kill your ability to fundraise in the future
> I think unions need to work on their marketing. I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems."
That would track if you were asked to elect anyone. You aren't. You're told to get your shit together, talk to your coworkers, and _solve your shit_ together. And when you do that - that's a labor union. Maybe not necessarily in the legal sense, but in a very real, material sense.
> I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems."
Damn you have a way different ear for people than I do. Unions actually have an incentive to please their constituents. Politicians generally don't (at least in america).
Unions need to stop marketing themselves as a way to get better work-life balance. The main benefit of unions is that employees are protected from individual abuse, because the entire union can put pressure on management in support of individuals who are being mistreated, underpaid, etc.
Half of those problems disappear in Europe, quality of life and happiness skyrocket. Sure, you won't have some carrot-on-the-stick IPO games but I don't need to, I am not on the verge of burning out, I have plenty of time for my family and kids and also myself. Kids education is free including top notch unis, (almost) so is stellar healthcare, no need to massively save up for that regardless of what can happen.
I had a big paragliding accident last year with both legs broken, tons of treatment, mris, various physiotherapies... still ongoing and cost 0 nothing, in even rural US those costs would be brutal. My (early) retirement is very well taken care of if all works out, we will probably have more money than we could reasonably spend plus some serious assets, all just our work from 0 in past decade and a half, both just employed at companies. Criminality is a topic on its own. I could go on for a looong time.
I couldn't care less about unions, I never felt oppressed or disadvantaged in any way in past 20 years across 3 different countries and many jobs, in contrary.
Good luck putting a price tag on such things, if you don't get it wait till you are older. Thats how advanced modern society should look like IMHO... the stress of being american with family and without massive cash reserves must be quite intense and relentless.
I live in the US and my employer provides excellent healthcare. I broke my collarbone last spring and had surgery to repair it followed by months of physical therapy. Zero dollars out of pocket.
That's the problem though, you're dependent on your company in order to not go bankrupt after your injury. If you get fired, you're screwed, if I get fired here in EU, it's not that big of a deal (plus it's harder to fire me in the first place)
>My (early) retirement is very well taken care [...] I couldn't care less about unions, I never felt oppressed or disadvantaged in any way in past 20 years across 3 different countries and many jobs, in contrary.
Where in Europe? Early retirement is a dream for the vast majority of European SW engineers. So you're in a very privilege position that's very hard to nearly impossible to achieve.
I have so many complaints about unions. Very briefly.
#1 Suboptimal governance. Especially when leadership gets "captured". But that's always true of all human orgs. I have nothing helpful to add here.
#2 Accelerating inequity. Corporate profits up while wages remain stagnant. Just as u/singron commented elsethread. I just don't understand how this isn't the central issue. For every person, union, voter, policy maker. For everyone.
#3 Adversarial relationship (in the USA). Labor and Capital (via their proxy, Management) need to work together. My only notion is to encourage member (employee) owned and managed co-ops. (Which would need access to financial support of come kind, eg "slow capital". Which is antithetical to Wall St, neoliberalism, rent seeking, yadda, yadda.)
That said... I'm very pro-Labor. And unenthusiastically pro-union, out of necessity, until we figure out something better.
Like you suggest, no way simply unionizing magically resolves my complaints. Meta stuff like culture, policy, laws, expectations would have to change, to create the space for "better" unions. Stuff like repeal Taft Hartley Act, institute sectorial bargaining, investment banks structured to support social endeavors (like co-ops), yadda yadda.
> If you don't see how this can be useful, that's a failure of imagination on your part.
I too can sometimes find it quite frustrating when a thing that seems like a good idea to me is rejected by other people, especially when that rejection seems to come after very little consideration.
But if you want people to adopt a view similar to yours, and they haven't yet, I think this sort of attitude is counterproductive. I think the person you replied to is right about there being a marketing problem here. If there's a genuinely good idea, and its acceptance/adoption is disproportionately low, it must be because people aren't seeing its value. Maybe that's because they haven't been exposed to it, maybe it's because they lack the curiosity or motivation to understand it, maybe it's because they've been misinformed or propagandized against it... either way, if you care about increasing adoption there's really no other choice than to try to actively persuade people.
I have a hard time with this pitch because I've watched people burn out working alongside me, on the same team, for the same boss, on the same problems, for entirely personal reasons. I've also been in shitty situations with shitty bosses that caused me a lot of stress, and it's hard to point to any clear lines that were crossed. I haven't heard any proposed union rule that would protect me in those situations, just promises that if a union existed, things would be better. It needs to be more specific.
We see what unions do for working class people, but our level of compensation, education, and cultural capital gives us everything that a traditional union gives to blue collar workers. Literacy, internet access, and money go a long way. We don't need a union to tell us what our legal rights are or help pay for a lawyer for us. We don't need a union to tell us what workplace conditions are legal or illegal. We don't need a union to tell us when and how it's safe or unsafe, effective or ineffective to report corporate malfeasance. Again, we have literacy, internet access, and money for legal representation.
Maybe a union could benefit me somehow, but I'm going to need much more concrete examples than just hey, your job is unpleasant sometimes, join a union!
The primary power of a union is the capacity to collectively bargain. It doesn't matter if you personally can't think of anything that you'd like to use that power for. If unionization is right for tech, others will. In the abstract debate it will always be abstract answers. Maybe those organizing a concrete workplace would be able to give you concrete answers.
> Maybe those organizing a concrete workplace would be able to give you concrete answers
Maybe that's why I've never seen anyone trying to unionize a workplace I've been in.
The abstract idea of a union has been enough to spark a lot of unionization efforts because workers knew exactly what they wanted to ask for. Safety equipment, overtime pay, health benefits, etc. Things they were already asking for but didn't have the power to demand.
So... we'll see, maybe someday someone will figure out what a union could do for me.
If factory workers could delete the processes and equipment they work on with the press of a button, they would be bought off too
Paying tech workers high wages reflects the need for them to side with capital when it comes to protecting assets
I had an Ask HN last weekend that did not get any responses but I would still love to learn what governance prevents workers from deleting key software products and their backups because I can't believe boards of directors are not responsible to guarantee product continuity to shareholders
What prevents them is sane compartmentalization. Even in accounting it's understood that you cannot defend again things like embezzlement if multiple employees cross different functions conspire, but you can defend against individuals by compartmentalizing their functions making every step further from their function more difficult to execute.
Same with tech. In a mature agency, if random dev has the ability to delete the repo and the back ups, you're doing it wrong. That said, your entire department is a threat you can't avoid. That is what a union brings to the table.
That makes sense. Treasury and Cash Management have been business functions forever.
The novelty of software engineering from an employee risk standpoint from my perspective was its control over product but in an insurance company, funds are the product too.
Strong worker protections can help in all kinds of situations. Case in point, I have a friend in Switzerland. He burned out and had a panic attack at work. The reasons were plausibly personal, but work stress always takes its toll as well. Switzerland has very strong worker protections and with a doctor’s approval he was able to take 6 paid months off while he recovered from the burnout. That was years ago and he has been back to work productively ever since.
We recognize physical impairment such as a broken leg but seem to have very little sympathy for the mental and emotional wellbeing of others.
These articles about work conditions in tech feel profoundly out of touch with the rest of the world. It's like reading a gazette from Mary Antoinette talking about how tough her life was (pre-revolution..)
The rest of the world outside of tech, looks at tech and sees a bunch of very overpaid developers with quite cushy perks...
Like sure, it would be great to unionise... But if tech workers don't acknowledge their privelege, they shouldn't be shocked when no-one else turnsout to support them.
> But if tech workers don't acknowledge their privelege, they shouldn't be shocked when no-one else turnsout to support them
It's hard not to read your comment as anything but virtue signaling, and doing so in a way that makes everyone worse off.
You seem to think being a part of a union means you think you have a bad job and everyone should pay special attention to you. Forming a union does not mean you are asking for anything, it means you are giving yourself protection to ask for things in the future without being fired. That's perfectly sensible.
Most tech workers I know are well aware they have desirable positions and do not see it as a bad job. Is there something specific you want people to do to acknowledge their privilege? I would guess not, short of "don't ever complain about your job, ever," which is not realistic in any profession
And as a side note, "tech" means a lot of things. There are lots of people in tech making a teachers salary with no benefits. Doesn't mean it's the worst job ever, but it's probably not most people's image of what "tech" is.
> Forming a union does not mean you are asking for anything, it means you are giving yourself protection to ask for things in the future without being fired.
The way I've always done it is that if I want something my employer won't give me, I find someone else who will and go work for them (or start my own company). What's wrong with that model?
Okay. If I'm in a job market where what I want isn't possible, what does that reality suggest about my demands, the market, and the people who ultimately set the prices in that market (i.e., the public)?
You're either for unions or not, in any job. So we could say the same thing about teachers.
But in reality, the job market is not necessarily a reflection of the market or demands. It can be a delayed reaction to false narratives. It can be meddling from people capitalizing on these narratives. Unions are good tools against this because they can negotiate with their actual value, not the "market"
But unions don't negotiate with their actual value; they negotiate by holding hostage the entire value chain in which their labor is a link. This results in the extraction of value from the public, who ultimately bear all such rents, and especially from displaced would-be employees, who the unions call “scabs” to justify denying them jobs.
I work as an regular engineer in construction and I have a very cushy job compared to the boots on the ground working in the mud. I am conveying what I and everyone else thinks about tech working conditions.
Also not against unions, I have to work with unions in my day to day.
Yeah, when people choose to write an article about 'how bad they have it', don't expect sympathy from anyone else if you 'don't have it that bad'. Christ, you all get paid 3 x plus the median salary... Go work a job with better conditions that pays less! Or use your incredible market power to move to a place that does have better conditions (which you all have seem to done anyway!)
Unionise for gods sake, but jeez it would help if some of you had to scrape a little in your past prior.
> I am conveying what I and everyone else thinks about tech working conditions
What you think about tech is not reality, but a riff on it. It's a cathartic exercise. The salary is generally higher, but not everyone gets paid very well and they have exactly zero protections. I know people who are working horrific conditions for not much pay. And it's not good if a new grad in debt can be replaced so easily even when they do their job well. So yes, people are going to ask for unions.
Not everyone who is a programmer has never shoveled shit. So when you say things like
> but jeez it would help if some of you had to scrape a little in your past prior
I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. It's clear you just have an image in your head of a programmer informed by nothing but stereotypes in your social circle. Programmers are not people with histories to you, but strawmen who were born into the role and don't have a life before or after. This is not in service of advocating for conditions of workers in your life, but just appearing class conscious when it's anything but. That's the virtue signaling.
> rest of the world outside of tech, looks at tech and sees a bunch of very overpaid developers
They most certainly do, but it says A LOT more about them that they see developers as overpaid rather than themselves as underpaid.
Propaganda from the owners of capital has worked well by ensuring that anyone relying on an income is more likely to look left, right, and strike down than to ever consider looking up.
Most businesses are not very profitable at all. Like 5-10% margin. If you took all their profits and made them wages (ignoring the consequences), thats not a crazy amount of pay increase especially compared to what tech workers make.
No one has the responsibility to prop-up marginal businesses by toiling for them or purchasing their goods/services.
Absolutely requiring the American "minimum" standard of living is propaganda set nearly in stone by The New Deal.
I'm a child of the working class. I don't think it does my parents a disservice in stating that their sacrifice(s) and toil were not compulsory. I appreciate them, but my father would not have required extensive surgery to walk again if we had settled for less years prior.
in the grand scheme of things, it's true that tech workers have very cushy nice jobs. but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make our jobs better.
tech workers should be at the vanguard and come up with imaginative ways to "disrupt employment" the same way we always talk about disrupting everything else. four day work weeks (or less), full remote, codetermination, equity/profit-sharing, etc.
we should use our privilege to raise the bar and set a precedent for better working conditions that apply upward pressure to make things better for all the less privelged jobs.
The tech industry unfortunately screwed up a basic social contract
It is well-understood in every other industry - if you want to be at a prestigious firm, make top compensation, sit in a nice office, work with top-tier coworkers and enjoy excellent perks, you must hustle hard and be unreasonably competitive every day to continue reaping those benefits.
I'm not even talking about back-breaking work - this is true for law, medicine, financial services, entertainment, sports, academia, and everything else I can think of.
After a decade+ run of cheap money and strong demand for talent, returning to broader reality may feel very unfair for many. But that doesn't make it so
I think what you're saying is coming for tech. It's just that we've been short 100s of thousands of engineers for so many decades. But both the training (education, hack schools etc) side is closing the gap, plus tooling is amplifying existing engineers such that the gap between supply and demand is closing.
There will be a reckoning when supply exceeds demand, and then talent and competition will reign supreme.
That being said there already is about a 10x spread between talent pay in tech (roughly $100k to $1M)
For some reason this sounds AI-written, especially this paragraph:
> Companies love to brag about their innovation, but the real innovation is finding new ways to make us disposable. Permanent employment? That’s for suckers. Why pay benefits and offer job security when they can churn through contractors and freelancers like cheap code? And don’t get me started on those non-compete clauses - designed to keep you locked down and terrified to make a move that might actually be good for your career.
I was scrolling the comments waiting for someone to say this. And it was this same paragraph where the GPT smell got overwhelming. LLMs love punchy but meaningless metaphors (how are contractors and freelancers like cheap code? what is cheap code?) and punchy
but generic turns of phrase ("that's for suckers", "let's get real for a minute", "don't get me started").
It reminds me of when Elon Musk used to show off how unfettered Grok was, how free to be edgy. Everything it said sounded like this.
100% had the same reaction and Grok came straight to mind. Either it’s an AI or the writer can’t write. Terrible article.
Interesting topic though - hopefully people responded without reading it. We don’t want more AI trash on HN. A lot of the comments are already clearly AI written / edited.
Class consciousness is firmly in the zeitgeist: witness season 1 of Severance.
There is no going back from this, as once you are disillusioned it is much harder to be re-illusioned. There will be some sort of collective response by white-collar professionals at some point. I think people are ready for change.
Most developers are paid more than 2x the median wage. For HN, that difference is probably 3x-5x or more. If class consciousness is on the rise, HN's readership is in the classes that the lower economic strata are going to be rising up against. If you have any illusions that the proletariat will welcome you with open arms for your claimed solidarity, think again or you might be in for a shock; specifically, a short, sharp shock.
Conversely, software engineers are generating considerably more profit for their employers than they receive in compensation on average. I know it's not the only metric of exploitation, but it's a hard one to ignore.
Disagree. Class consciousness is about realizing that societal classes correspond to their relation to the means of production, not the concrete wage being earned. The majority of developers is part of the proletariat, at least according to Marx.
In an actual class conflict, when a group of working poor people knocks on your door and notices that you are a little too well dressed, a little too well fed, lacking the calluses and fatigue from working two low wage jobs, a little too well spoken and educated, a little too bourgeois, do you think they will be interested in discussing the minutiae of the Marxian definition of the proletariat or weighing the metrics of exploitation before they drag you out into the street?
That is why all vaguely successful revolutions have been based on a Leninist-type vanguard party based on an educated "elite" claiming to lead the masses. For better or worse, their implementation of Marxist ideas was fairly consistent.
I strongly feel that groups within the "classes" often have vast differences that make me question the idea of class consciousness. A well off tech emloyee has interests that align far more with those with wealth than a small business owner who might have interests far more aligned with blue collar workers. And don't even get me started on social differences, like LGBT right etc that divide people.
Social differences shouldn't make you question class consciousness. Quite the opposite is true, to be class conscious means to have recognized what economic class you are in regardless of any other features.
Hidden there is a good point though. Social differences can be leveraged as a means to deter class consciousness. Let's take the idea of the wage gap for example. Now both male and female workers can be underpaid. As a result, everyone is less likely to become class conscious and realize that, if they instead fight over a wage difference within their class.
More like people who work in some media companies have certain political beliefs that may or may not be out of touch of broader society. Witness their constant surprise at election results as an example.
I dunno, I live in a nice house in Kansas and work from home for a nice company and have nice benefits. What am I gonna be disillusioned about? My life is literally the best it has ever been.
It’s certainly one thing in the zeitgeist but I still have the sense that culture war stuff has a much firmer grip on a larger number of people and has a lot more power to swing elections.
That includes both its left wing “woke” form and its right wing reactionary form.
Very anecdotal but it also seems that the culture war stuff is stronger among those making less money, which would be the target audience for any class revolt rhetoric. Could be wrong though. Maybe my sample size is just small.
Have there been successful general-software unions formed before? I see and hear this idea relatively frequently, but never past that.
I sort of feel like most people don't stay at a place long enough to get cohesion or see enough they don't want to stay in the first place, good people chase better job offers (and congratulate themselves for doing it on their own), less good may stick around longer because they can't move but also are more focused to just stay employed.
Software is also a broad industry in terms of the type of deliverable work (e.g. think buy-once software vs. SaaS vs. in-house industrial controls), skillsets, and environment. It's also hard for me to even conceive of what a typical fast-moving startup would look like full union. Lines between ownership and management and labor can get very blurred.
Is the best hope to look at things like the entertainment industry which are also extremely fluid, but have been very successful? Do we need a long-term period of dev salaries coming closer to median pay (which we might be entering now)? Do we need to better address the ageism monster?
The games industry recently made some real headway [1], which I applaud. Maybe focusing on smaller sectors is the right approach.
I work in a union shop and I admit that it doesn't seem to have all the problems I have with the big tech. People seem to care and have passion, but don't pretend to work 80 hours a week, some of them at least. Some of them are decades older then me. Nobody is ever fired, but it somehow pays well above the median pay, but not comparable to the big tech.
I don't take the 80 hours thingy at face value, I take it as something people bullshit one another about. I would not even buy 16 hours working week at face value. Nobody does that much actual software making day in day out for years.
You can think of it as buying yourself more free time to do things other that dealing with computers. One of the things in the union contract is literally the ability to buy yourself another month of vacation in addition to those twenty something days you get by default.
It makes even more sense if you take having children into account. I want to play dark souls with my son more than I want to deal with some css, form validation or api integration bullshit. Once he grows up, I will never have this moment back.
Elseforum, I've debated this. I consider it to be more of an inside company lobbying group than a union. In particular, they have no ability to collectively bargain for a contract. None of their wins are things that have been able to be put into a contract.
Furthermore, some of the issues they've brought up have been things that are... not contractural and rather political. For example https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/press/ceasefire-demand ... while it is ok for an organization to have opinions, things that are not about the contract that the worker has with the company gets into... well... political issues and that can hinder the ability for the group to get a majority representation and be able to do the things with contracts.
I worked for 8 different companies over my 35 year career. Not once did I feel exploited and wanted a union to come to my rescue. But that is just my experience.
It’s weird that they reference alphabet workers union when specifically that union has done nothing for full time software engineers in its entire time.
The ideal is to encourage developers to start their own small businesses and support each other by being customers. That, and when you find success/profitability, don't sell to a big tech nightmare or PE—just run the business.
The "machine" is a natural side-effect of mega corporations and creating unions will just encourage more creativity around stealing your soul or getting rid of your entirely.
Correct. Devs need to stop believing that business acumen is some special skill they can't develop. It's not magic. Your CEO isn't a better human than you despite what LinkedIn tells you.
> Are you advocating for everyone to create their own SaaS here or what?
End of the day, most engineers need to join employers. We can’t have 10M+ different SaaS out there and each engineer develops their own personal brand of it. That’s not how software scales.
Create your own SaaS or consult/freelance. Or if it's too stressful or not lucrative enough, start another type of small business. The "big business with lots of employees" thing is a relatively new phenomenon. Most people used to be solo operators or part of a family business.
And if you prefer, employers who need engineers aren't going away. They're being temporarily deluded into thinking that they can get rid of their teams due to the AI hype, but I expect that to change as "vibe coded" software starts to fall apart.
Certainly, but it's far more rewarding than being grist for the mill. You can spend your entire life doing less-hard work, only to wake up at 80 and have nothing to show for it but a bank account that you can't take with you.
Building your own thing is a rough go (13 years deep myself), but hell if I don't wake up most days with a shit eating grin on my face.
> Certainly, but it's far more rewarding than being grist for the mill.
Depends on your goals and your personality.
When I list the things I want to achieve in my life, working for myself drastically reduces the likelihood of achieving those things - unless my own business makes enough money for me to retire in a few years (extremely unlikely).
> You can spend your entire life doing less-hard work, only to wake up at 80 and have nothing to show for it but a bank account that you can't take with you.
Amusingly enough, I feel it's even more acute when you work for yourself:
"You can spend your entire life working hard for yourself, only to wake up at 80 and have nothing to show for it but a (tiny) bank account that you wouldn't want to take with you."
At least when you work for someone else (at about 40 hours a week), there's room for hobbies.
I recall a friend of mine - a local inventor (he had a PhD and kept building things, trying to make products out of them, etc). In his mid 50's, he had invented a lot, but his only success was that the business didn't go under. He qualified for food stamps, and hadn't taken a vacation in over a decade. He never had time for a meaningful relationship. He cut his losses and took a regular job. He misses doing deep technical work, but he's much happier.
Smart guy. I knew younger people who worked for him - did more fun technical stuff than I've ever done for a job. They took the lesson to heart and got regular jobs eventually, as well.
Out of curiosity, was he doing work on the side to fund his inventions/research?
I see a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck in the "I have to go all in on this thing I'm not certain will work" vs. "I can do freelance/contract gigs on the side to fund my work and still have a decent standard of living until I prove out my idea(s)."
You're right that it comes down to goals and personality, but if you're in a position where you think a union is going to help save you, you may be better off working on your own thing.
I don't know if he had side work when he started, but by the time I knew him, he didn't. He made enough money to stay afloat and have some (cheap, but smart) employees. By that point he had no time for side gigs.
> It’s a meat grinder that chews up developers, sysadmins, and infosec pros
…and designers, and PMs, and sales and marketing and support and…
I know that, charitably, the point is that engineers often have higher leverage than other individual contributors at a tech company.
But the whole point of a union is to join together employees (as opposed to employers) for greater leverage. Don’t make your tent smaller for no reason!
I feel very fortunate to have worked other jobs before my first in tech. My last was hanging drywall and I will never forget how awful it was. I haven’t loved every part of every tech job I’ve worked, but I’ve always chosen to be there.
I think the author is missing perspective on what the alternatives are like, and seems to have a lack of agency when they say things like:
> How many of us have been forced to work on projects that make us sick to our stomachs - surveillance tech, data mining tools, algorithms that reinforce social biases - because we don’t have the power to say no?
There’s incredible mobility within tech - more so than almost any other industry. Vote with your feet! I’ve taken major pay cuts to have more choice over my work, and have never regretted it.
I think it makes sense when you look at it specifically with the "burnout" context in mind. The truth is, burnout can happen to anyone and it is often unclear whether there even is any real recovery.
And it can even happen not just necessarily due to overwork but due to lack of a clear goal, death by a thousand papercuts, complete riddance of passion and interest for certain reasons.
Sure it's nicer to work from your desk than to hang drywall but if you do end up burning out that will affect your brain and possibly permanently alter it. After that, who knows if you could even work in the industry at all anymore?
Personally I believe we way way underestimate it. Longevity is more important than exploiting the passion and overmotivation of potential burnout candidates for short term gains.
I can only speak for myself, but I would absolutely rather work burned out in tech than work in the trades again.
Drywalling was absolutely destroying my body, mind, and will to live.
Mobility is also a factor - I’ve had high stress tech jobs, but always had the option to quit and do something else if I felt close to burnout. That mobility doesn’t exist in many other jobs.
The nature of free market is competition. And the nature of competition is to get more profit out of less people. It means longer hours, more focus, less complaint, less life. You think new technology is gonna save the poor workers coz it boosts productivity? Only temporarily until everyone has it. Then It's the same game all over again, pushing out new features, new compaigns, re-org, transformation around the clock.
Once one player in the market starts to work the longer hours, it's guaranteed to spread to every corner. Coz you need to up the game and catch up with the competition.
If history shows anything than it is that companies will abuse workers if there is no organization and legislation stopping them.
The fact that some get a good salary but way more get a bad one plus a lot of abuse should be a concern to all of us.
You may be lucky and sitting at a big company with nice stock options, a six figure salary. But: for every one of those there are many barely scraping by just making minimum wage, with no hope in sight
I wish the common consensus would be: yes, we should band together and fight for each other.
Have you considered instituting a formal quality system? I'm not even saying that it's an alternative to or incompatible with licensing, but there are off-the-shelf standards for software process and quality you can download and implement today without government action.
A surgeon doesn't get to time-travel and test 1000 different ways to make a cut. You don't get to build 1000 bridges in the same location for load testing. But with software we can have a final deliverable that remains inert if you put quality gates between the development process and deployment. There is a very strong argument that when it is possible to have process and testing to hold the deliverable itself to the standards, that puts more confidence in the deliverable than just practitioner sign-off that it's right.
Why should I as an individual software engineer not support this? We’re already in this profession and pulling the ladder up could help us maintain our salaries and working conditions
Like with "practicing medicine without a license" or "practicing law without a license" ... what would constitute "practicing software development without a license?"
The licenses are enforced by law... and just having a certificate isn't sufficient for them to be useful. You also have to say "you can't do this without a license."
> The Software Engineering PE exam, which has struggled to reach an audience, will be discontinued by the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying after the April 2019 administration. The exam has been administered five times, with a total of 81 candidates.
> NCEES’s Committee on Examination Policy and Procedures reviews the history of any exam with fewer than 50 total first-time examinees in two consecutive administrations and makes recommendations to the NCEES Board of Directors about the feasibility of continuing the exam.
Part of it was "most software developers don't have enough experience in other engineering disciplines to be able to pass the FE exam"
> This collaboration was preceded by Texas becoming the first state to license software engineers in 1998. The Texas Board of Professional Engineers ended the experience-only path to software engineering licensure in 2006; before the 2013 introduction of the software engineering PE exam, licensure candidates had to take an exam in another discipline.
> NCEES Director of Exam Services Tim Miller, P.E., says there was a lot of discussion about the exam’s impact, including how many people with software engineering degrees were taking the FE exam. “If they’re not even taking the FE exam, they’re probably not going to take the PE exam,” he says. “In addition, if the boards aren’t regulating the [software engineering profession], it’s tough to get people to take the exam.”
I absolutely support everyone's right and freedom to join a union, so long as it's not mandatory. (The couple of unions I was part of in my life, I didn't have a choice if I joined or not afaik) That freedom of choice is a fundamental good that must be respected.
Without agreeing that unions are the solution, I think I agree that there's certainly some big opportunities to close unfair gaps or disparities between W2 workers and other classes of self employment / businesses (in a very Tech + American centric perspective)
1. Insurances tied to employer, not just health, but also disability and life. IMO this is a major barrier to folks not working for the biggest company they can, it's a subtle form of bias towards direct employment, and by the biggest companies.
2. Retirement and other pretax benefits only (easily) available through w2 employment. IMO the tax benefits and vehicles for accumulating assets should be front loaded and universal... A bit like Canada's TFSA program which gives ~5K a year of tax sheltered investment. It's also a bit weird that certain classes of workers can claim a home office, but a WFH cannot, or can expense their tools, transportation, marketing etc, but W2s cannot... (Try and expense your Linkedin account when you're looking for a new job, that's marketing cost). IMO every employee should be ran as a small corporation that has revenue and expenses, and the IRS has very little say over what was or wasn't necessary for the purpose of maximizing revenue.
Just stop working more than 35-40 hours a week. If you get no bonus because of this action, that's not so bad. If you get let go because of it, the next one could be more tolerant. You are not a slave, so don't act like one.
I’ve only been in tech for 10 years but I’ve worked at companies of various sizes (FAANG, a 50-person startup, and now a mid-sized “unicorn”) and I’ve never had to work crazy hours. Maybe leading up to a launch I’d work past dinner occasionally but mostly my work weeks have been 40-45 hours consistently.
Am I just lucky? I mean obviously I’m lucky relative to the world (tech has been lucrative and interesting during this decade) but are others in tech really working crazy hours all the time?
I have worked with some people who seem to turn any job into a 24/7 thing but they were either workaholics or under-qualified people trying to substitute quantity for quality. And it did not seem to pay off for them.
I’ve always thought that San Francisco was a pretty laid back city. Working until 7 is “late”. My friends in NYC think that’s early.
I will say that I’ve always thought oncall as a concept is odd and somewhat exploitative. Only software engineers and doctors seem to carry pagers. And software engineers (mostly) don’t save lives.
Tech is a big industry. It employs millions in the US. I’ve met people who only work 20-25 hours/week while pulling down $500k/yr+ at a known company that has a very toxic work culture. I’ve met people making under $150k who are working 60-70hr/week regularly at a supposed easy company. All within Silicon Valley.
The reality is that experiences vary widely in the industry even within each company - sometimes even within a team.
And even if you want to work onsite- ever notice that the near-universal distaste for open offices? Yet that's a trend in tech that refuses to die? There's an anti-open office layout story on HN every month, or used to be. For all of the power that software engineers think they have as an occupation, why can't they overcome being stuck in a bullpen, sometimes even in a floating desk setup?
Maybe all of the cushy perks are just what management is willing to bestow, and something as simple as getting cubicles or team cubes is beyond the reach for most staff engineers.
Would a labor union be overkill for getting such a concession? Perhaps. But in the absence of any sort of professional representation to push back or push for things, all you can do is blog stories that get upvoted on HN, and not much else.
How many tech jobs are 80 hours a week? My work life balance is pretty good at a smaller tech company, so is it the FAANG jobs expecting 80 hour weeks?
I've never heard of hours like that outside of early high-growth startups. Have worked at FAANG and know many people who've worked at many of the FAANG companies.
I’ve worked 80 hours in a week at Microsoft; before a paper deadline. After though, I was able to work less and regain balance. It’s certainly not unheard of before any kind of deadline at many companies.
I think we should normalise talking about average (median) working hours, not the extremes. I probably worked 100+ hours on paper deadlines, but working 60 hours in startups is about my sustainable limit, and when coding it’s more like 45.
People lie about their average working hours so much. If you listen carefully, it usually becomes apparent that their claims are physically impossible, eg they mention that they went to the gym each evening when the hours imply they should have been working. Generally, anyone who states above 55 hours should be treated sceptically.
> You know the pitch - beanbags in the office, free kombucha on tap, and "Agile" processes that are supposed to make everything more flexible, more efficient.
Does this still happen? This sounds kind of 2010.
What I find interesting about this page is how poorly written it is. It looks like a chimera of AI writing (bullet points) and someone on too much Adderall (…because that's happened to me). It's too long yet too short at once. I think the author should try reading it out loud to someone else.
A lot of these pro-labor-reg people argue (and I agree with them!) that the ROI on additional hours worked past 40 is pretty bad.
If this is the case, then someone working an extra N hours a week won't actually move the needle that much when it comes to performance ranking.
My experience has been that the people who choose to work super long hours do not actually perform much better, if at all, than those who don't.
Caveat is that this could, of course, be selection effects a la Berkson's paradox. Maybe those who work very long hours do so because they must to reach the expected output level for the firm they work at.
I agree with this, but I think we need to keep in mind that oftentimes managers and executives aren't aware of how this works in our domain. When it's time to cut someone short, they have to decide between you and me doing 40 hour weeks vs. some other employees putting in overtime. It's not an easy problem to solve though.
right, but a lot of people at Big Tech are looking for the sweet spot of productivity, and it very well may be 45 hours a week or 48 or something, and to others that is unacceptable.
I don't see very many senior level folks in FAANG who are "5:01" engineers. There is pressure, but you're compensated quite generously for it.
Exactly. As usual, HN commenters are rat-holing on the precise meaning of "demanding 80 hour weeks" and trying to refute it by saying "Well, ackshually, companies don't spell out an explicit requirement for exactly 80 hours, therefore there exists no pressure to work long hours!"
Example given: When one of your co-workers gets visible praise and maybe a small spot bonus for burning the midnight oil, working a heroic 100 hour week, and saving a production outage, this sends a clear message to everyone else: more working hours will be rewarded and normal working hours is just doing the bare minimum. This message is unwritten but clearly sent/received.
When you are stack ranked against your peers in the company, most are working 80 hour weeks and some are working 40 hour weeks, and the 40 hour guys get PIP'ed, this sends a clear, yet unwritten message, too.
There doesn't have to exist a written policy that says "You must work 80 hour weeks" for it to be an unofficial, coerced part of the culture.
It's as if nobody here saw the "15 pieces of flair" scene in Office Space.
These companies attract hyperanxious and/or hypercompetitive types (among many others, e.g. the hyperdeluded "save the world" types, the hypermaterialistic "drive to work in cars worth 6 figures" types, etc). You don't accidentally end up in a big tech job. Most people have to grind leetcode in order to get into these companies -- you know full well what you're getting into. Your offer letter may actually state "people come to this company to do the best work of their lives".
No time like the present, and I know that the tech labor movement has been going on for a while, but it's a real shame that this idea didn't get more traction a few years ago at the peak of worker power.
LarryDarrell on July 8, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizin...
My worry is that without premature organization, the next recession is going to make the "tech worker shortage" a permanent thing of the past. We'll never have as much negotiating power as we do now.
If say there was a Tech Workers Union/Guild/Association, we might have been able to protect the older workers at IBM, or the outsourced workers at Disney. Maybe there could be a push back against open offices and poorly implemented Agile. As it is, we're just better compensated workers floating from job to better job.
Have been on both sides, running a company, and being an employee. Neither side is happy with current status-quo, but we're at some equilibrium.
How does this sound as new equilibrium: companies pay across board become around ~40%-50% less than it is today. Avg tenure and stability goes up ~2x what is today. Would we as an industry take this up?
The VC funded startup unicorn game is not helping the world. The paragraph on not being able to say no to questionable products is interesting. It's similar in structure at nations under a ruler. That said, we're not starving, so we might as well redirect our resources toward more useful for humans, society (and even the planet).
IME, most of the people in tech who work extremely long hours have not actually had this "demanded" of them by anyone, and in fact either want to do it or have sort of hallucinated themselves into a corner where they (mostly incorrectly) believe that they will land in hot water if they don't work long hours.
Please can you give us a typical daily schedule of these 80 hour week folks?
Do they have lunch? How long is their commute? I presume they are in the office, otherwise you’d have no way of verifying they work 80 hours. Are they working weekends? What do they do if they need to go to the doctor or dentist? Do they take holidays - how much? Sick days?
Do they take breaks during the day? How much time in the office is actually spent working?
I have never seen anyone consistently work more than 65 hour weeks, and the only person I can verify is me, and long term even that probably wasn’t sustainable.
Simple calculation 80 hours, let’s say spread over 6 days. 13 hour days. Say 30-40 mins for lunch now we are at 14 hour days.
Let’s say they can get up and out and to work and back and to bed within 1.5 hours.
Now you are at 17 hour days. Leaving them 7 hours to sleep, 0 hours to exercise, take any breaks, do any kind of life admin, speak to anyone on the phone, do any kind of social media. And that gives them one day off to do absolutely everything they need to do. Obviously none of them can have children or other dependents. And none can have hobbies, a gym routine, etc.
It just doesn’t add up. There is no world where people actually sustainably work 80 hour weeks where they work for 80 hours.
i've enjoyed the fluidity of startup software work. have a job for a bit, it's exciting, the thing blows up or goes bust. get a new job. hire some other devs. have to fire them because out of cash (sorry, no hard feelings i hope). burning out? quit!
maybe i'm just in a fortunate enough position to be able to take risks, but i have no interest at all in unions, strikes, secret conversations that the article suggests. would be a mild red flag for hiring for me (expressing overt interest in unionizing). it has a hint of difficult to work with, politicising the workplace, power games.
i will say this though: talk about salaries with your colleagues (if you want)! employers have the deck stacked in their favour with this taboo and there is no good reason to uphold it afaiks as an employee. the more you all know the better position you are in. don't need a special club with dues and leaders for that
There should be a union for YC startups, to prevent them from being exploited so badly. By the time the startup meat grinder eventually peters out, the founders own almost nothing of a fairly worthless company and the employees even less. Meanwhile YC pimps the myth of the startup and cashes the winning lottery tickets.
> Push for Ethics: Let’s make sure that any union platform we build isn’t just about wages and hours, but about ethics too. We need to have a say in what we’re building and how it’s used.
This was the most important part of the article for me.
I just passed the CISSP; and while studying for it, I was very impressed with how much emphasis ISC2 put on human safety/welfare, which is something that I feel like our industry is lacking more than ever lately.
> The safety and welfare of society and the common good, duty to our principals, and duty to each other, require that we adhere, and be seen to adhere, to the highest ethical standards of behavior.
This will take a change of attitude. I entered the industry right around the dotcom bust, when people were still making the jump from their 9-to-5 for whatever big or small company to seeking angel investment and starting their own business. My observation early in my career regarding unions and software engineers was "The first step would be for software engineers to stop thinking their biggest impediment to greatness isn't management; it's the underperforming slacker in the next cube over holding all the 10x engineers back."
But I think that change is coming. Enough engineers have gotten burned (or been through the startup washing machine enough times) to suspect that the profession as a whole needs to be able to self-advocate.
I dunno. I've been waiting for that to happen since the 90s, when the D and R halves of the uniparty fully teamed up to make Wall Street and corporate profits their #1 priority and encouraged the exporting or outsourcing of every job possible. We've had 30+ years to do something about it, but we were always too independent and anti-social for that.
Go work a manual labor job outside in the sun for a few weeks and tell me how bad tech employees have it. Most of non-tech America is not empathetic to our plights. They’ll probably cheer on the offshoring of our jobs.
I am not really decided if i am pro or anti tech unions yet but this argument always comes up and falls flat for me. It just smells like pitting the working classes against each other. Are we more privileged than most? Sure. We are still closer to broke then we are to the 1%.
I might agree from the tech worker’s perspective, except to someone working in fast food flipping burgers, a tech worker making $200k/$400k/$1M+ might as well be in the 1%.
I went from developer to "burger flipper". There is some mythologizing going on, but that is a lack of perspective. The people I work with don't have the time or money to graduate their skills.
Paramount, most of them could easily, easily train into tech roles given the opportunity.
On the other hand, your post "rinks" of a general ignorance of labor history in the US, where unions have (at least, historically) been able to support each other across industries and facilitate class solidarity amongst workers. Perhaps if you showed up to some picket lines in your city and worked to build connections with your fellow workers by providing support in their struggles, you'd find that they're supportive of yours in return.
Couldn't agree more. My friend broke his finger and I told him how privileged it is to go to the doctor when there are plenty of people in the world with cancer and other more serious diseases.
I think it is possible to acknowledge that privilege, while still highlighting the things that suck for us, and the ways unions can help. I wish the article did this. I firmly believe there is a strong case to be made here. It gets muffled by the narrowness of the author's perspective.
I've worked in a kitchen and a warehouse for a while, I absolutely know how good we've got it. I have friends who tell me about people dying at their workplaces. Pretty much everyone I know who's not a programmer is living paycheck-to-paycheck. I'm still incredibly burnt out, and probably couldn't continue for another 6 months if my life depended on it.
That came across as a largely angry rant instead of a reasoned appeal. With decades in the tech industry I never experienced the kind of problems described. Mostly it's been a lot of fun.
You can just do things, like quitting and starting your own company instead of trying to convince a hostile company to unionize which is not a cure to any of these malaise style issues
> You know the pitch - beanbags in the office, free kombucha on tap, and "Agile" processes that are supposed to make everything more flexible, more efficient
No offense, but was this written a decade ago? All of that stuff is long, long gone.
> demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion."
Not my experience at all. From startups to big tech/FAANG, silicon valley and otherwise. Never been asked for an 80 hour week, nor seen anyone work one. I can count on one hand the times that a manager has explicitly asked me to work late in the 16 years I've been doing this professionally.
> If you’re not pulling all-nighters, you’re "not committed."
Not reality.
> If you’re not answering Slack messages at midnight, you’re "not a team player."
Not reality.
> This culture is toxic, and it’s only getting worse.
By what measure?
> this industry is not your friend. It’s a machine, and unless we start organizing, it’s going to keep grinding us down. It’s time to talk about unionizing tech jobs.
And yet, I'm still all for this. I just don't appreciate the silly hyperbole about the state of the world.
Maybe this isn’t an article designed for “me”, but there is a sizable workforce of people who aren’t getting paid super high salaries for super high responsibilities.
I’m talking about the hourly tech employee. The customer support call center agent. The HVAC technician. The on-the-go consultant. Yes, it’s not glamorous, but it’s reliable, it not stressful, and it still has good benefits.
I’m salary software engineer lead and I work past five maybe two or three times a year. If I need my boss I have to call him after hours. There’s plenty of dev jobs that aren’t stressful.
" the tech industry loves to sell us on the myth of the "dream job." You know the pitch - beanbags in the office, free kombucha on tap, and "Agile" processes that are supposed to make everything more flexible, more efficient."
Never seen that. I'll also bet vast majority of tech workers have never seen that either.
Unionizing is always a good idea, but unions can be a complicit joke.
A "no strike" clause is a big red flag that its not gonna do anything .
And organizing is a good way to get fired. Employers don't care - they won't get caught or prosecuted and if fined it will be after the critical organizers are long gone.
It takes some next level leadership to make it work that is mostly missing
Perhaps another reason to unionize is to claim more of the political power being wielded by our industry. Unions can play a role in shifting where lobbying money goes, how industry advises politicians, etc. At least I think that’s how things used to work. Not sure how anything works anymore…
personal theory: burnout is basically when you're expending more energy than than you're able to recover during rest -- over chronic timelines. that is, i think getting physical health right addresses many causes of burnout. getting your device and app use right addresses a set of others. finding ways to connect with your team, users, company mission addresses other potential problems; ie feeling alienated and on a futile or harmful mission is a great way to get burned out.
How do you then compete with companies from other geographies willing to overwork US companies? Sounds great on the surface, but if you slow down the treadmill too much, you risk falling off completely.
Not burning your employees out is good. Totally unclear that working "80 hour weeks" is any more productive than a standard 40 hour week. Keeping employees around by slowing things down and making things more humane means you can retain employees for longer, build institutional knowledge, build a good culture at the company, etc. You can have a company full of atomized, dehumanized, and miserable workers... or not? Not seems better.
Oh, you miss the point. Nobody wants to overwork. The sweet spot is billing US company for enough hours for them to think you work more than their engineers, undercutting them in the absolute terms and getting more due to purchase power you have in your locale.
I'm generally in favor of unions, but I don't understand the game theory under which an L3 up to L8 (for example) have enough in common that they would be a single bargaining block.
Compensation and authority scale up pretty quickly in large tech companies. Also, much of that compensation is in stock, which makes the tech workers capitalists. I'm skeptical that you're going to encourage unionization by telling people they're evil for owning capital.
So if the goal is collective bargaining power you first have to figure out what mechanisms need to be in place if L3 and L<N> have diverging interests. Then you need to figure out if waging a 19th century holy war against capital is important, in which case you have to make a case for why tech workers should give up the ability to be compensated by shares.
Also if you want people to come together, maybe stop trying to bully them? Some of the comments on this thread are really beyond the pale.
Ran this through few AI checkers and they all flagged this as highly likely written by AI. Surprised to see it passed the sniff test for users on HN enough so to make it to the front page.
Sure AI gen can be hard to detect but for the most common models it’s easy to detect. I would hope HN has a way in the future to filter out clear AI generated blogs. HN has been an oasis to get away from bot spam and AI slop.
There is nothing wrong with unions, but they are a response to an imbalance in bargaining power. In places with lots of smaller employers, there is much less benefit.
You get a nice piece of metal, come close and personal with coppers and live happily in exile in Europe ever after. Either that or you become a homeless drug addict. There are always exciting choices for these exciting times.
This was actually very popular with offshoring and the results spoke for themselves. I made a lot of money cleaning up those dumpster fires and it's hard for me to not encourage more of it.
I've picked up work that way too. There are two problems with it, though.
A) After a company has sunk a bundle into offshoring with nothing to show for it, it has less in its budget for me. They may be desperate at that point, but that doesn't mean their checkbook is bottomless.
B) The dream of cheap/subservient/good skilled labor dies hard in management sometimes, and it can take years before management realizes its mistake. Meanwhile, the company may go out of business before it has a chance to come home and pay me the big bucks to clean up its mess.
This seems overly-catastrophizing to me. I don't deny it rings true for many, but I think some of the statements here really depend on your team and company.
"We aren't like the other big companies," was a line I heard associated with some big tech companies circa 2006. Implication was that they saw the dysfunction at larger firms and chose to build something different.
Fast-forward twenty years, and they're just like them.
We were just younger. Now we have lives and families and sleeping under our desks sounds far less appealing when there's a warm bed with a spouse you love back home...
I joined a hungry machine that was desperate for my labor. I would love to be properly exploited like I used to be. Instead I'm expected to spend all my time faffing about talking about how i might actually do some work in some theoretical world. and that makes me miserable.
Peter Turchin's research indicates this is not a good description of where the lines are. The elites are roughly the top ten percent and represent an important barrier. Billionaires are involved, but elites as a whole are more numerous and closer to the steep, stark social cliff face that defines the abyss.
> We’re living in a world where billion dollar tech companies expect us to live and breathe code, demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion." And what do we get in return? Burnout, anxiety, and the constant threat of layoffs.
..apart from 6- or 7-figure pay, a chance to hit it real big, and to built things that everybody uses? and this for job positions that 40-years ago commanded an average salary, because the latest React is not rocket science.
Reminds me of "apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
As an outsider, I'm astounded why workers aren't unionizing to a much higher degree. It's been proven to work [1] against the misinformation, discord, and wealth inequality that companies will, inevitably, cause. Despite the small union fee, the individual clearly stands to benefit[1]. Is it because people are cheap? Or not familiar with history? You'd think that tech workers were quite informed.
America != Norway. American labor unions have (had?) a reputation for corruption, dragging companies down with inefficient and parasitic practices and in some cases being controlled by organized crime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Brotherhood_of_T...).
Isn't the question then about the lesser evil? It's wrong to deny unions on the basis that some people are corrupt. Some people in companies are corrupt too and the US lies squarely in the middle of the corruption index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index?w...
I don't see why America!=Norway is a relevant argument.
Maybe you will be less astounded if you read more about how large countries in terms of areas, population, ethnicities, immigrants have people with different and sometimes conflicting motivations about work conditions.
Conflicting motivations sounds like a very reasonable thing in large populations, in fact. But I have a hard time believing why workers wouldn't unanimously want better pay, better conditions, and more power. I would be curious to see any counter examples!
There's a bit of strawman going on where for example when author says "Not taking 12am slacks makes you not a team player". Never in my life have I heard that one.
Also, anecdotal perspective: I've been private company and academia for my whole life, and I've been with good and bad companies over time. If I had a union earlier in life, I think I would have benefited a lot. I don't think a union could make my current situation any better though. (Again, anecdotal)
Why does this AI-generated article have 400 upvotes? The conversation here is valuable, but surely we could find a human article to have it under instead?
> The tech industry loves to hype itself as a meritocracy, where the best and the brightest rise to the top. But in reality, it’s a meat market. As soon as you’re not "on the cutting edge," you’re out.
I feel like these calls to unionize aren't trying to improve working conditions for tech workers, they're just trying to find ways to politically capture tech companies
That's why, you know, most of the people who call to unionize are left wing progressives who don't work in tech (and a large number in the bay area resent the shit out of tech)
Frankly given their attitudes towards meritocracy, "social justice", etc, I don't really trust these groups to actually negotiate a better deal for me. I'd expect them to just use the leverage I give them to screw me over. Go on Alphabet Workers Union's website and this is the exact shit you'll see
They probably target tech specifically because they think we aren't "class conscious" enough to understand our own situation. That's why they don't go and bother the finance industry, those guys know where they're sitting economically
Awesome to see something like this on HN. As we keep working for less pay, more hours, the constant threat of layoffs, and business leaders frothing at the mouth to replace us all with AI, it's important to remember that we aren't powerless as workers. It's also important to remember that your relationship to the higher-ups is adversarial. They want to get as much productivity out of you for as little pay as possible. It's not because they're evil, it's just good business. Organizing helps protect us as things get worse.
I see a lot of my colleagues resigned to the reality we live in and just hoping they get lucky enough to come out on the right side of the meat grinder by making a few bucks at a startup. I've worked in a couple industries, and tech workers seem to lack solidarity in a way I haven't seen elsewhere. I survived three rounds of layoffs at a startup, and every time the attitude among some of my colleagues was that we "trimmed the fat." I somewhat agreed and got caught up in that culture until I got picked up in the fourth round of layoffs at a time when I felt I was doing my best work. We need each other as workers to get through a future that looks gloomy for technology developers. As the saying goes: "united we bargain, divided we beg." A better world is possible!
> It's not because they're evil, it's just good business
Almost everything I have ever heard described as "good business" is pretty evil
You never hear "Oh we should give everyone a raise, that's just good business"
It's always stuff like "we put 10000 orphans through a meat grinder to make 10 cents, it wasn't personal it was just good business"
Edit: of course that is an exaggeration
But more realistic examples include things like "we laid off 200 people the week before Christmas so we hit our targets for the next year. Not personal, just good business"
Frankly, maybe if companies need to make such "good business" tradeoffs frequently, it shows that the people running them aren't actually good at business in the first place
> You never hear "Oh we should give everyone a raise, that's just good business"
Lots of big tech companies give people raises automatically when they think they're too underpaid.
> Frankly, maybe if companies need to make such "good business" tradeoffs frequently, it shows that the people running them aren't actually good at business in the first place
I really, really don't get this. Sometimes companies overhire. Sometimes it's even their own fault that they've overhired.
Either way, clearly IT HAPPENS and sometimes companies will need to lay off workers when it becomes clear they're not useful enough to justify their pay.
It's not inherently a reflection on the workers or the company; most of the time it's a reflection of interest rates and nothing more.
> most of the time it's a reflection of interest rates and nothing more
Yeah that's basically what I'm saying
Unsustainably over-hiring to take advantage of low interest rates is viewed as a smart business decision. It may actually be a smart business decision, but it is still evil
>good business is evil
Yes (often)
Startups are risky and unionizing won't force them to keep you employed. In fact, it will create an environment of less startups and more large companies with less choices for the employee.
Union heavy countries like Sweden have almost no startup scene and wages are normalized (ie: almost all the same across white collar industries).
Why do you think that Sweden has almost no start up scene?
According to this crunchbase data [1] it has a lot per capita.
[1] https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/countries-most-startup-...
This just sounds like you and your colleagues work for shitty companies.
This doesn't generalize to all companies! After all, if you started a company, certainly you'd do things differently... Right?
> They want to get as much productivity out of you for as little pay as possible
It’s only adversarial because you want to get as much pay as possible out of them for as little productivity as possible.
> I somewhat agreed and got caught up in that culture until I got picked up in the fourth round of layoffs at a time when I felt I was doing my best work.
Did everyone feel that way?
> It’s only adversarial because you want to get as much pay as possible out of them for as little productivity as possible.
And the employer wants to pay the employee as little as possible for as much productivity as possible.
In a perfect world with perfect information and rational actors on a level playing field, this is great: we expect supply and demand to converge, this is econ 101.
But it's not a perfect playing field, one side is coercive, holds most/all the cards, calls all the shots, treats people with lives and experiences as "resources", and seeks profit over all other objective functions. This is class dynamics 101.
> And the employer wants to pay the employee as little as possible for as much productivity as possible.
Yes, this is literally what I replied to in the first place.
Both sides want to get the most for the least.
It doesn’t matter how tilted the playing field is or is not, both sides have the same goal.
I never said that both sides have equal chances to get their goal.
> It’s only adversarial because you want to get as much pay as possible out of them for as little productivity as possible.
Or maybe pay that’s proportional to the value we provide
It’s always proportional to the value you provide. You just don’t like the proportion lol.
What specific proportion do you think is fair? And how do you calculate the value you provide?
The workers will decide and they will dictate it to you as you have done unto them.
So as a worker, what specific proportion do you believe is fair to dictate?
It's not at all a matter of fairness. It is a matter of might.
I mean, the same question can be asked of my employer.
Yes, but right now I’m asking the person who said they wanted a proportional amount of value.
Either they can/will answer the question or they can’t/won’t.
Maybe they didn’t feel answering your question would give them a proportional amount of value.
In a capitalist market, it is explicitly not proportional to the amount of value you provide. That is the underlaying principle of capitalism…
Read up a bit, man. Even a capitalist would agree with this.
I can assure you it is.
You get paid X. You deliver Y value. The proportion is X / Y. Sometimes that proportion is very high, sometimes it is very low. Sometimes it is negative. Sometimes you get a divide by zero error.
And again, the questions.
What specific proportion do you think is fair? And how do you calculate the value you provide?
I don't think you understand what "proportional" means. It doesn't mean "there are two numbers."
It means that when looking at all employees, compensation is strongly linearly correlated to provided value.
What specific linear correlation do you think is fair? And how do you calculate the value you provide?
That's literally what "proportional" means.
Jesus Christ. That’s not how it works!
Capitalism is explicitly not about that. Holy shit this is insane that you think that’s how capitalism works on a website that’s literally about venture capital. What the fuck.
X and Y exist right? Why can’t you divide them to make a proportion?
Among other reasons, because the employer holds all of that information and I'm not given access to it. It's an asymmetric information problem.
But you can for sure tell me the proportion that you think is fair right? Should it be 25%, 50%, 99%?
You're not arguing in good faith, dude.
I dunno, he's asking a really basic question that should be trivial to answer. When I see a basic, level-setting question like this go unanswered, it starts to seem like the side refusing to answer is the one acting in bad faith, not the side asking the question
The answer is 100%. This brings us to the start point of the real conversation this person is trying to have, which likely centers on the nature of employment, the importance of Job Creators, and/or the infallibility of markets.
> The answer is 100%.
But that's not a valid answer? It seems like you're sidestepping the question by moving the goalposts and redefining terms.
The reality is that there will always be a gap between "what a company is willing to pay you for your work" and "what your contribution to the whole earns the company", and that's... fine? The whole is often greater than the parts, and this difference contributes to that gap. The gap also needs to provide for the commons of the company: workspaces, licenses, equipment, interest/loan repayments, etc.
This mostly just a fleshing out of the `X` and `Y` quantities mentioned by the ancestor. If you don't think the whole is worth that much more than the parts, then presumably you should seek employment at a company that offers you a larger absolute `X`, a larger relative `X / Y`, or (ideally) both. If no such company exists, you could attempt to start one of your own? That would be the ultimate vote of confidence that such a thing is even possible, right?
I suspect the reason why such companies do not exist is because that's actually much harder to accomplish than you're making it out to be.
Yes, that is the real conversation.
100% seems delusional to me because you're saying that the company deserves no profit for doing the work of providing you customers to provide value for?
It also seems to ignore the fact that some of the value you're creating is used to pay for the work that enables your value creation. Think about payroll processing, benefits administration, hiring, etc. etc. Those roles provide value as well but don't directly bring in money.
Isn't that part of the tradeoff of working for a company that they take a "fee" for giving you dependable work? You can approach 100% value-capture by working for yourself but there are downsides there as well.
I assumed that each of these entities would also earn 100% of their contribution to the value created. How you split up the credit is a difficult problem. (As many developers will note, there is no such thing as a 'cost center'; all labor contributes to the outcome.)
However, a bigger problem in the current state is the existence of parties whose only real role is funding, but who receive an outsized portion of the reward.
You’ve just found a roundabout way to repeat the idea that you don’t like that someone else is getting what you believe to be an unfairly large piece of the pie.
Because currently in the world today, the owner of the business is earning 100% of the value they provide as is the developer as is the bookkeeper.
You just don’t agree with each person’s view of the value they create and don’t have a way to determine the actual value they create.
So we’re back where we started.
> However, a bigger problem in the current state is the existence of parties whose only real role is funding, but who receive an outsized portion of the reward.
Isn’t the funder getting earning 100% of the value they create (just like you want them to) by providing capital? If not, how do you prove otherwise?
> I assumed that each of these entities would also earn 100% of their contribution to the value created.
So... you're describing the current system?
This is so loosely defined as to describe any system, really.
How so?
The whole discussion stems from someone saying that they should be paid relative (in proportion to) their value.
All I want to know is what proportion (i.e. a percentage between 0 and 100) someone would deem fair. Why is that so hard to provide?
Yes but they do that without doing any of the labour.
I am an engineering manager for a large team of developers. Part of my job is to estimate the cost and potential revenue of big projects. I have a spreadsheet of everyone's salaries (including bonus compensation, other perks).
I've done the math at my own company: average developer salary is approximately $100k. Our largest teams have 10 developers, so about $1M in labor costs. These teams work on projects that bring the company $10M every year.
We literally earn $1,000,000 for every $100,000 developer salary. Developers are some of the most productive workers in the world, but only keep 10-20% of the fruits of their own labor.
I am shocked that developers haven't figured this out. Almost all of the value they create goes into the pockets of their CEO.
I'm sure many of us have figured this out, it's just that there's no alternative for most.
I live in Europe and we are all unionized and I hate to break it to you but we're still creating much more value than we earn for someone else. Our work conditions may be significantly better - I work 40h/week with unlimited vacation (within reason ofc) and sick days - yet still burnout happens frequently and necessitates costly rehabilitation trajectories.
We deal with the consequences better, and I'm grateful for the conditions here, they may well be much worse elsewhere, but the core issues remain. Humans aren't built to work mentally straining jobs for 8 or more hours per day, and the fruit baskets and vacations only do so much. I believe a four day work week would help some of it.
Turns out when your work is thinking, you end up thinking a lot about the alienation of your labor's fruits.
Burnout isn't about pace of work or ability to take vacations. Burnout is about a disconnect between effort, meaning, and rewards.
I disagree.
Burnout is caused by your body running on adrenaline and cortisol for too long as you’re pushing past what is sustainable. Eventually your body says - enough! And it forces you to stop.
The _symptom_ of burnout are as you describe: essentially you no long see the point of what you’re doing.
Speculatively, I believe the drop in motivation is your body’s way of stopping you pushing it any further. It’s a defence mechanism.
Hm I see. You have a point that the causality is not necessarily how I described. But I am not convinced it is the opposite.
What causes the workplace to make you have high adrenaline and cortisol for too long? Stress is perceived by the body as a threat and it subsidizes when the body perceives that the threat is overcome. If we exert ourselves for a while but then we have a good outcome and we celebrate with our colleagues, we will have dopamine and oxytocin levels rise and adrenaline and cortisol subsidize. Something one might say makes the exertion meaningful.
So I hear what you're saying but I think we're both describing the same thing from two perspectives and not actually different causality directions. I described the subjective interpretation and you described the biochemical process underlying it.
What is “the alienation of your labor's fruits.”?
I haven’t heard of any way for objectively measuring the value of anything, or whether that is even a logically coherent concept.
> I haven’t heard of any way for objectively measuring the value of anything
Really?
If you know of some way that is logically coherent, and can demonstrate it via standard proof notation, then you should definitely publish it.
And become the most famous human being to have ever existed…
There's no need to be snarky. The values of things can most definitely be objectively measured, otherwise there would be no transactions. Objective is not absolute, the objective evaluation might change when the agents involved have new information.
I also don't thing it contentious that the stockholders pocket some of the results of the workers labor. That is the whole point of employing people isn't it?
Why do you think I am being “snarky”?
I meant it literally. I genuinely believe that if you could demonstrate the proof and publish it… then you would become so.
Though you'll need to deduct a lot of SG&A, etc. overheads from that as well, and it often looks far worse.
Big Tech companies (ie ones close to monopolies) still extract a ton of net cash flow that ends up going to investors and top management, though you could then ask why those monopolies extract cash from their customers as well, etc.
My worry with tech unionization is that generally it slows productivity increases and change. I get why bus drivers, etc. in stable systems should organize and could do so without adversely affecting system performance, but in tech/startups, I don't think those companies would exist in unionized form for very long before being put out of business.
Now they're just saddled with too much bureaucracy and politics, and that's already led most of them to underperform, at least on an innovation basis.
> My worry with tech unionization is that generally it slows productivity increases and change.
Do you have examples?
> Now they're just saddled with too much bureaucracy and politics, and that's already led most of them to underperform, at least on an innovation basis.
Who?
Yea, it's more complicated than that, but in the US context unionization (like in the automotive and steel industries) was shown to slow innovation. [1]
The counter to this is that Europe actually has better outcomes because it takes a more collaborative approach vs. the adversarial approach in the US, and this better approach has shown to improve some outcomes.
[1] https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/Unioniza...
The linked paper is strongly biased towards the ownership class--and the think tank is labeled "libertarian-conservative" on wikipedia, so I'm skeptical of the conclusions.
Yea, almost anyone in the US asking about the productivity implications of unionization will be coming from the ownership class, as US unions don't see that as their problem vs. building worker power.
I couldn't find a paper about US unions increasing productivity. Can you?
Fair. And I didn't look for other papers. If the discussion is simply "unions decrease productivity" however that's defined, that may be true. But by how much? Is that a problem? To whom?
I suspect unionization is better for more people overall.
Interesting approach. Did you ever try to include other factors into the model ? Such as :
Would be curious to see how big the ratio remains.The alternative is to start your own company or start consulting. I've been doing this for over a decade and make great money compared to a salaried employee.
Doing this has also made me realize that development is only a small part of the overall process.
Most developers just want to code.
10x is purely on payroll, which is not that great. there are a lot of other things you have to account for. There are companies that do 100x or more.
the other commenter said it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43436688
This is overly simplistic. I don’t fault you for it, but it shows a lack of understanding how a business functions.
There is a lot of overhead that goes into running a business, as others have mentioned. Taxes. Rent. Utilities. Licenses. Certifications. HR, testers, project managers, product managers, people managers, directors, marketing, customer service, sales, C suite, and on and on.
I know right now you might be saying “those people don’t even do anything! Developers are the only people making the damn product!”. Again, a business is kind of like a product of its own. It takes many moving parts to take a usable product and get it to market, fight off competition, work with government for regulations (or keep from getting regulated), find and get customers, etc.
Once you try and “go it alone” you will realize that creating the product is only one small part of making a functional and profitable business.
I run a small business. I don’t use half of those roles I mentioned and there is still a lot of overhead. It is very easy to underestimate the amount of extra work involved.
And yet you still turn a profit at the end of the day, i.e., money that's not going to 'overhead'. Let's not kid ourselves. Your interest as the owner is to maximize that profit and minimize expenses, and our interest as workers is to maximize our wage and minimize your profit.
> Your interest as the owner is to maximize that profit and minimize expenses, and our interest as workers is to maximize our wage and minimize your profit.
Business owners are also responsible for ensuring their employees (and payroll taxes) are paid whenever revenue dips into the "L" part of "P&L".
Wise owners ensure some portion of profit is retained such that temporary market adversity does not immediately result in terminating their employees.
People who have never had these concerns make sweeping statements such as the one quoted.
You are correct that the interest of a business owner is not to kill their firm.
As it should be. I am not begrudging anyone of that. As a matter of fact, I often mentor employees on treating their career as a business, and build it accordingly. Just like a strong business, you should be selling your services for as much as reasonable, and if your employer is not paying the appropriate price then find another “buyer”.
To maximize the price you can sell your ‘product’ (you), you should be making career decisions that strengthen your offering. This can be taken too far (those that only look for promotions at the expense of real work), but it can be done ethically very easily.
>As it should be.
No, this is just the (insane) status quo. Ideally, however, businesses exist to carry out a mission (beyond making money). Part of this mission is supporting the livelihoods of employees; part of it is giving a return to investors; part of should be some social net good (maybe within a larger societal context, if not unilaterally). Much as "maximizing" the price at which you sell yourself (ick) often ends in workaholism, broken personal relationships, unhealthy relationships to material goods, and a generally deleterious existence as the opposite of a happy, upstanding, and well-loved member of society, "maximizing shareholder value" usually ends in a business that is either a hated monopoly or a bankrupt shell (often both, in that order). In both cases, hyperfocus has lead to the loss of the entire reason for pursuing the venture in the first place.
Profit is just a KPI for something else that you're supposed to be doing (and often a bad one, depending on what that something else is).
This is cringe idealism. It bears no resemblance to the way things work.
> Ideally, however, businesses exist to carry out a mission (beyond making money).
I mean, sure, but the defining difference between a business and a nonprofit is making money.
It's important for companies to provide value to society but the way we measure that is by how much they earn. Despite several hundred years of people trying to come up with better ways to do this, this is the only one that seems to work.
Non-profit organizations are often colloquially called "non-profit businesses" in recognition of the fact that they are organized and operate as any other business would - in developing business plans, filing with the IRS, hiring employees, minding balance sheets, etc - except in ways related to their purposely not seeking a profit (though revenue is another matter).
>but the way we measure that is by how much they earn
Again, it's a flawed heuristic. Military contracting is wildly profitable. Value to society is questionable.
>this is the only one that seems to work.
Analysis of the subtle successes of social democracies and "Gross National Happiness" are just two examples that put the lie to this myth.
> Again, it's a flawed heuristic. Military contracting is wildly profitable. Value to society is questionable.
It's not questionable at all but if you don't already see that I'm not interested in arguing it with you.
> Analysis of the subtle successes of social democracies and "Gross National Happiness" are just two examples that put the lie to this myth.
GNH is cope from the Dragon King of Bhutan to justify the poverty and ethnic cleansing of his nation in the international community. The Nordic countries all have very high per-capita GDP.
If you wanna call my claim a myth, citing a few metrics which correlate really well with GDP is not very convincing.
You actually do seem to want to argue.
Militaries exist expressly to destroy (enemy) societies. Even if you agree with the reason for a war, that fact doesn't change. So "preservation" of one society (if becoming beholden to a MIC doesn't change that society) versus the destruction of another. Questionable value.
>GNH is cope from the Dragon King of Bhutan to justify the poverty and ethnic cleansing of his nation in the international community.
The commencement of measuring GNH coincided with marked increases in Bhutanese living standards by traditional measures. Nordic countries have roughly the same GDP per capita as the US. Countries like Japan and France feature lower GDP per capita and, while not traditionally considered social democracies, feature comparable approaches to social welfare, income equality, etc.
Free-Market Capitalism as the only way, or even best way, to prosperity is indeed a myth. Even at its best or most successful, it has to be tempered with robust social policy and economic controls, lest people fall to excess and the economy itself burn out. That's called, "Late-Stage Capitalism", and you'd best start believing, because we're in it.
> No, this is just the (insane) status quo. Ideally, however, businesses exist to carry out a mission (beyond making money).
Well, that's the beauty of the system. You can go and be the change you want to see in the world.
That's the standard conversation line that sounds oh-so optimistic but it's not actually true, is it?
As soon as you need to raise money, or as soon as you need to compete, the system will either beat you into submission or you'll get out-competed by companies that don't concern themselves with any missions other than making the maximum amount of money possible.
The most ruthless, dirtiest, immoral players can cut the most corners, grease the most political wheels and offer products and services at the lowest prices.
This is true, and what Machiavelli was talking about in his book The Prince. He is not talking about HOW to be an asshole ruler, he was talking about what other asshole rulers WILL DO, and how you will need to deal with that (as a ruler that does not wish to be a tyrant).
While it certainly reads satirical, in the sense that someone writing a book like this now would come off comically evil, there is nothing to suggest it was a satire. That's just a reddit thing that's been trending, and largely put forward by one historian a long time ago.
There's plenty of reason to think he wrote this book earnestly to boost his own political standing with the Medici family. It was not written for the common man, it was written as a resumé for political leaders to peruse. However, he distanced himself from the book in his later work.
The whole world is a cartel. Not because it wants to be - quite the opposite. But because it is a necessity.
I appreciate your frankness, and I am not an idealist who is proposing that the market 'should' be this way or that way for purely moral reasons. But the topic at hand is unionization. An aspect you neglect in this post is that another way to raise wages (or 'total compensation') is via collective bargaining. If tech workers really do care, and have a collective interest, and are able to overcome countervailing forces, this is an inevitability. No longer will the ball be purely in your court as an employer to solely determine the value of labor.
I don't agree that the worker's interest is or should be in minimizing company profit - this is a very zero sum approach that doesn't really cover companies that aren't stagnant or dying.
I agree with your general point that a business CAN increase profit by reducing costs, including by reducing employee compensation (and there are lots of shortsighted, greedy people out there) but increasing revenue instead is often much more significant and, in theory, can increase both employee take home and company profit.
A business is a mechanism to turn labor and other resources into revenue and often aligns with paying for more expensive talent in order to provide more valuable revenue. Businesses that are failing or stagnant can't grow revenue anymore and have to cut costs instead.
I don't think the imbalance between workers and companies is in a zero sum, adversarial relationship. I think the imbalance is in who gets to decide what to grow and what to cut (which is one place where collective bargaining helps a great deal).
The aim of the worker is not usually to kill the firm, I assumed that went without saying, as that would ultimately 'minimize' their wages. But the reason to work in a society where one needs money is to receive a wage, as maximal as possible. These incentives will always contradict whatever real but necessary need there is for 'genuine interest' or 'social tendencies'. Constantly businesses attempt to harness this value, (which is the source of revolutions in productivity beyond the daily rote labor) through trying to present the relationship as anything but transactional. But as their interest in this value is ultimately a monetary interest, what the worker returns to them will be done on a transactional basis. An inhuman force rules over all.
>I don't agree that the worker's interest is or should be in minimizing company profit - this is a very zero sum approach
You misunderstood the post you're replying to. Workers vs CEOs (not companies).
> Your interest as the owner is to maximize that profit and minimize expenses, and our interest as workers is to maximize our wage and minimize your profit.
Is it? I know a handful of small business owners, and generally their interest is running their business well and keeping their customers happy. Sure, they want to be profitable, but profit isn't their primary motivator.
Ditto on the worker side.
Your outlook on this is wildly cynical
They may have a moral sentiment and so too do employees - but the market is the ultimate condition for any moral sentiment to survive. You have no company, you no longer 'satisfy' customers. I am not referring to a moral idea, but a cold reality of business.
... What? I can't follow what you're trying to say here. It sounds like you're contradicting what I was replying to?
It's not that profit is one 'motivator' among others, it is the sole and ultimate condition for the survival of a business.
Before maximizing wages and minimizing profit, your interest as workers is to assure that the owner is provided with enough financial motivation to both stay in business and not find substitute employees or solutions for the work that you do.
When I use the word maximization I am not referring to an abstract idea, I am referring to a negotiation with material necessity.
Can you estimate the actual overhead rate? Maybe 100%-200%?
It varies greatly per company and industry. You are talking about Net Margin and it can vary a lot.
A company like google has a 28% net margin. That means that after paying all expenses for employees and rent and everything, they have 28% left over from revenue as profit. This is very good.
Amazon (being a hybrid retailer/tech company) has 9.29% net margin.
Target has a net margin of 3.84%.
Believe it or not, many public companies have a negative net margin, meaning they spend more than they bring in. Lyft had a negative net margin until just this year. A few years ago, they had a negative net margin of -70%! That means if someone didn’t keep putting money into the company they would have “ceased as a going concern”, as they say. Their most recent year they had a 0.39% net margin. Go Lyft!
If "employees" includes the CEO, then low net margin would not refute GP's claim that
> Almost all of the value they create goes into the pockets of their CEO
>> We literally earn $1,000,000 for every $100,000 developer salary.
Start your own company, hire the developers for $200,000, double their income and get rich.
> Start your own company
Okay, that seems easy enough and affordable with most tech salaries.
> hire the developers for $200,000
And you've just applied an unspoken filter. What founder can afford paying someone $200k a year, let alone multiple people? So that means you need to either be filthy rich already or to get investors - who will likely have very strong opinions about whether you should be paying devs double their market rate even if you still make a profit.
Not to mention that this assumes "your own company" can earn $1,000,000 for every developer it employs. Because "your own company" likely has a completely different value proposition, different customers and different tech.
The profit (read: surplus value not paid out to employees) of a company doesn't directly translate to market success or competiveness, but it can affect factors that do (e.g. availability of investments, bank loans, etc). It's not necessary to exploit your workers to operate a sustainable business, it's just very difficult to compete with companies that do because they can tap into those profits to cut you off (e.g. by cutting prices below cost) or leapfrog you (e.g. by acquisitions or hiring more people).
The existence of a company willing to pay its employees 2x the market rate doesn't impact the ability of other companies to hire enough sufficiently talented people at or below market rate to squash that company if it is small enough. "We live in a society" - or in a market in this case. The market wasn't created yesterday so if you join it today, you're starting at a disadvantage, not an equal level playing field.
Funny how competition and a free market makes it all possible
Tech CEOs will do anything to reach FAANG market caps and revenue except pay FAANG-level salaries.
Isn't this how business works?
For example, walmart revenue per employee is $300k but they mostly make minimum wage.
starbucks is $94k/employee
It is funny when middle class salaried employees notice the same thing that every minimum wage worker knows intuitively, but that’s part of how this system remains stable is a lack of awareness.
This is how the monetary system works. While your math is inaccurate in terms of the spirit of what it is attempting to show, correcting for that, its still the way of the world until money is no longer a thing.
> This is how the monetary system works.
No, its how capitalism works. The monetary system is largely orthogonal.
No. Respectfully, you don't understand how money works and the proposal of vaguely applied ten cent terms can't make up for that. Ironically, this means that you also don't understand socialism.
Capitalism is simply the innate nature and structure of the monetary system. The maintenance of the properties of money require capitalism. Otherwise, you will begin to not have money. No matter what word that you use for it. I'm not saying that this is a good thing. It's just a concrete thing.
The more socialism that you apply, especially in terms of shelf goods, the less actual money that you have. Due to how prices will react, what you begin to have is something akin to allotted credits or even just de facto allotted goods. The former which necessarily implies price controls. The only question then is how much food each person will be allotted.
Tell me which companies, ahem, I mean "socialist countries" aim to maximize free GDP allotment (in this case for food) to each individual citizen instead of minimize it to the lowest possible level? Consider a hypothetical wherein this socialist country has 300 million people.
The negatives of capitalism are not because of capitalism. They are because of the structural nature of money, which only maintains value roughly relative to the degree to which a large amount of people don't have it.
Smart countries attempt to maximize socialist benefits without affecting their currency value, in order to control and promote social stability to the best of their ability. But this generally excludes socialism for common goods, or else the characteristics of money begin to change.
The income of the company is not the "fruits of the labour" of the people that work there. There is no logical connection there.
You don't "create" all the value just because you work there.
Also the total cost of employment is much higher than salaries, and there are big overheads in any business that aren't wages.
If every single person paid to work on AWS leaves the company overnight, what happens to the value of AWS? Sure, Amazon could eventually hire enough people to replace those who left and maybe even keep AWS running and develop new features but it would be a catrastrophic loss of value and take a long time (and a huge investment) to recover.
You don't create value by having capital either. Labor converts capital into value. Labor can also transform capital (e.g. produce code which can then be used to provide a service for money). Plenty of people have "ideas" but ideas are worthless in a vacuum. If you pay someone to turn your ideas into capital you can use to generate value with cheap labor, your idea didn't become valuable by itself, you literally paid for labor to refine your capital to become better at generating value - you may legally own that refined capital the same way you owned the initial capital but the transformation had nothing to do with you other than your means to pay someone to perform it for you. Your money didn't create value, it merely facilitated the transformation of your capital and the creation of value. Your individual ownership of that capital is entirely unnecessary in this.
The tech, knowledge, software, etc of a company is a multiplier for the value labor can produce. It still requires labor to produce that value. It also requires labor to maintain that multiplier, much like literal machines require maintenance. The industrial era analogy still holds true (and arguably even more so given how specialized individual jobs can become).
The total cost of employment is generally not an order of magnitude more than salaries. Wages are the biggest cost factor in most companies, especially in companies built on knowledge work (e.g. software). The biggest employee expenses (though usually defined in terms of easily obtainable bonuses and often with severance packages other employees don't have access to) are CEO and other CxO-level positions. This isn't because of a natural value of these positions to the company, this is almost entirely the result of years of advocacy to investors and boards promoting the idea that these positions should be paid several orders of magnitude more than everyone else with very little factual evidence to support that idea - it's pure ideology and it's fairly recent.
The overheads are irrelevant for the general point, too. Corporations need to make a profit to function. Corporations don't need to siphon that profit almost exclusively into CxO-level benefits and shareholder dividends. You're right to argue that if a company makes $1,000,000 per $100,000 employee, that doesn't mean it makes $900,000 in profit per employee. But even if the operating costs are so high it only makes $100,000 profit per employee - that's still money left on the table (which the individual employee has no leverage to demand a fair share of).
Well if it's that simple go ahead and start a company, generate $1M per employee and pay everybody their fair share. If you're right you'll get the top 0.1% talent in that market, no question.
Let's see how you do, best of luck.
And how will you leverage that as a developer? Only making a startup seems to work.
And then it gets even worse in Europe.
This write up sounds like it describes a very particular subset of companies. If you only want to work at the flashy unicorns in downtown San Francisco, you are signing yourself up for exploitation.
Like any career, if you get off the beaten path there are plenty of pretty okay jobs out there. Especially if you have a marketable skill. This is software, if you have a brain and functional hands - you already own the means of production!
I absolutely support unions - but you're going to personally be better off changing companies and working your career ladder and finding the spot for you than sticking around at an exploitative company just because they have a union.
> This write up sounds like it describes a very particular subset of companies
Indeed.
80 hours a week (or even 60): Never had to deal with that in over a decade across 3 jobs. In fact, I've never had to work a weekend (and if I did, it was either to fix my own screwup, or because I intentionally slacked off during the week and needed to make up for it).
Slack/email off work hours? Just ask up front in the interview: "I turn off my laptop at the end of my work day, and don't install any work related items on the phone. Is that OK?"
On call? Lots of jobs that either don't involve running an online/web service, or if it does is for some internal company tool where the cost of it being down is low. I've never had on call. However, I did interview at places that did, so the questions to ask in the interview:
"What is the on-call rotation look like?" Typically it's one week per person, rotated by the number of people in the team. Team has 4 people? That's once every 4 weeks (too much for me).
"How often are people called during on-call?" I interviewed in one place where they got 2 calls out of work hours in the whole year. I can live with that.
"What's the process of evaluating those calls?" Do they just expect you to take care of it and move on, or do they have a process to analyze and prevent it from happening again? Some teams move too fast and there will always be calls - they don't want the hit in fixing things.
Incredible idealism. If you work in infrastructure, even development, there's no such thing as shutting down at the end of the day or weekends. 'You never know' if someone senior gets agitated off hours because something is broken, and is expecting a big group on a zoom call
I do work in infrastructure and never had to work out of working hours unless I was oncall. Our on-call rotation is 12h a day for a week, because we have an oversea team taking over. I get oncall every 5 weeks. You can absolutely find places with good working condition and with a good salary
In the US?
In New York I am finding the expectations getting higher and the salaries stagnating, to the point that I'm considering taking the plunge into consulting.
There's not a lot of infrastructure job talk on HN as everyone is a software developer or academic type.
A union doesn't have to be "workers for company X employees". It can be "web developers union" or similar - this is how the trades organize (see the pipefitters, and IBEW for some examples).
Neat thing about this type of organizing is that the union provides training and standardization paths. Both of those make moving between jobs easier.
They can also provide a standardized way of differentiating employee levels (e.g. union sets the standards for what a jr, sr, or whatever is). I'm not sure if that is good or not in tech, but it is a possiblility - and it's something that would definitely help employers too: rather than each company having to test each potential employee, a union certified X dev will have a certain skillset. Yes some X devs will be better than others, we're talking about humans here, but the minimum bars can be defined and the whole hiring process can become easier and more efficient.
Theres some interesting compensation challenges to get the idea of unionization more accepted in tech tho: stock based compensation and bonuses can get really tricky - something that I suspect is the real reason unions don't catch on more in tech.
> something that I suspect is the real reason unions don't catch on more in tech.
I think a bigger issue is the difficulty of measuring correctness and quantity of individual output.
For a classic-style of union in manufacturing, the standardized widgets coming off an assembly line mean it's easier to determine which workers are being fired for actual-cause, versus the ones who need to be protected by the union because it's a kind of employer retaliation or stealth-downsizing.
An awful lot of unions exist in spaces where "compare the widget to the template" is an impossibility. Some examples:
SAE standardizes the labor cost for a given task, although an individual mechanic may go faster and slower than the proscribed hours. The same mechanaic will have different times for multiple instances of the same task based on details of the job.
Police unions effectively require arbitration on an employee by employee basis, since police work is so highly situationally dependent.
Creative unions like SAG and screewriters guild often don't have the notion of measuring quality of output. They exist to ensure various workplace rules (safety, breaks, sane environment, etc) and minimum compensation standards are followed.
The union is not a template of how to be an assembly line worker - its a way to equalize the power between an employer and employees. The specifics of how one union negotiates its collective bargain don't dictate what a union for an entirely different group of people will negotiate.
> Police unions effectively require arbitration on an employee by employee basis, since police work is so highly situationally dependent.
Are police unions real unions? Or just a vehicle for them to further avoid accountability for their wrongdoings?
> It can be "web developers union" or similar - this is how the trades organize (see the pipefitters, and IBEW for some examples).
This is also how unions exist in most of the rest of the world as well. We take it for granted how weird the US labor recognition process is.
Most other countries following a long history of craft unionism. But in the US the laws were crystalized during a time of active conflict between traditional craft unions and socialist-inspired "industrial" unions. So all of the principles of the NLRB are this weird set of dated compromises.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_federation_competition_i...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craft_unionism
I quite like the idea of a trade union or accreditation board for SWE. The idea that we all work by a shared set of standards and terminology is appealing.
Sounds like a group that captures credentialing in the industry and then winds up using it to push their own flawed ideology on the entire industry. Because who else would actually be interested in being part of such a board.
No thank you.
Civil, mechanical, electrical, and most other engineering disciplines have an accreditation board. I don't think they are pushing a "flawed" ideology in those disciplines. At least I don't see civil engineers constantly questioning why they would do load modeling for a bridge, like SWE's constantly question the value of unit testing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABET
Yeah and what are the numbers on how many employed engineers hold that accreditation? Just because it exists doesn't mean it's used.
I know for a fact that aerospace, electrical, and mechanical engineers working on designing rockets, nuclear reactors, space capsules, and electric charging infrastructure do not need this credential. And so most of them do not have it.
If they have an undergrad degree in any of those disciplines then their college has ABET accreditation.
IDK why, but I totally mixed up ABET with the professional engineering credentials where individuals get accredited as opposed to curriculums.
I'm not sure ABET is the most relevant here? What would making CS programs accredited change?
Consistent educational standards leads to a common shared understanding of what knowledge and training your engineering colleagues have. This also makes it easier right off the bat for an employer to know what a "junior" engineer is - and leads to more consistent experience levels afterwards.
And you didn't quite mix it up, a degree from an ABET accredited school is required to get your professional engineering certification, which is often required in cases where engineering designs carry legal liability.
I think there's still a lot of inconsistency and judgement that happens for gauging whether someone is junior and for what skills they might have. Many software engineers don't have CS degrees at all and even more have ones from different countries.
I am unable to find concrete numbers on this, but I would bet that the majority of employed engineers in the US do not carry a professional engineering certification.
I don't argue with your point regarding how many engineers have their PE. I don't have mine.
My point is that accreditation boards and trade unions can help set standard minimums of what an engineer (or trades person) will know going into a job. Of course employers can ignore them, but in general those standards help bring consistent expectations to a given trade.
It could be as simple as you only need to take the Leetcode exam once every ten years instead of every time you switch jobs.
I don't trust a credentialing board to vet my coworkers for me.
EDIT: i.e. I'm still going to want to interview them and have them prove to me that they can write code.
And yet, that's what we do with CoderPad, Leetcode, Karat, etc.
Yes, of course you should still interview them afterwards, I'm sure that's what credentialed professions do as well. My point is just to have the Leetcode portion be done once rather than for every company's interview.
No, but that's what I'm saying though.
I don't trust someone else, especially some credentialing body to administer leetcode style questions. I'm still going to want to have a candidate prove they can actually write code.
Do you perform interviews on potential doctors or lawyers you may choose to use? If you trust credentialing bodies for such important services why the distrust for something non-lifethreatening like an employee?
Yes? Of course I do? Do you seriously think that doctors are a commodity with no difference in skills between them?
The phrase "get a second opinion" is so intrinsically tied to medicine that it's a little weird that you'd imply that any doctor will do.
A second opinion comes after services are rendered. I don't think you put your doctor through a ringer like an employment candidate, was the point I was making.
No I do though, although the context is of course different since I don't know a bunch about medicine.
I ask a ton of questions and I've found that good doctors a) welcome the questions and b) do a good job of explaining. If q doctor doesn't really give me good answers then I'll go elsewhere. A lot of doctors appointments are ahead of some bigger procedure or an ongoing relationship, so the first meeting definitely is evaluative for me.
Maybe you can ask them domain-specific questions more relevant to the actual position you’re hiring them for? System design? Pair programming session? Debug a code sample? Present a solution for a home coding assignment?
Anyway, many companies are outsourcing phone screens now to services such as Karat, where Kiwi contractor engineers provide 24/7 interview availability. Yet those interviews cannot be transferred from company to prospective Karat-using company. So you get the worst of all worlds.
Contracting out interviewing is nuts. IDK how a company can think that the level of validation you get in a coding interview is necessary and also think that it can be outsourced to someone else. They seem completely at odds with each other. I assume they're just cargo culting what other companies do though.
I don't think memorizing trivia is a useful signal for a job, which is what a lot of "domain expertise" looks like in interviews. If you're going to write software and solve problems for a job then you should be able to sit down and solve some medium difficulty coding problems. It's not that hard. Personally I'd much rather do that than a take-home coding assignment.
The number of people out there working as engineers who can't write basic code is too high to not check.
To be fair it’s just the phone screens, but this is the world we’re living in. Eventually someone will build another Triplebyte with AI evaluators and so on and it might actually catch on.
To go back full circle, if you get a decent credentialing system then people who can code can simply pass a test once (let’s say every 5-10 years) and be done with it instead of every single time they interview. DRY!
If it existed then we'd legally be forced to write awful enterprise-style OO-heavy Java, because that's what all the "software engineering" courses at university taught as best practice.
> you're going to personally be better off changing companies
Job mobility for tech workers is a fluke of current economic conditions. If interest rates spike, or a recession happens, or a bubble bursts, this benefit would go away and you'd be stuck at that exploitative company or unemployed.
Unionization and labor laws can make workers less disposable without substantially affecting growth (see: European tech hubs).
> make workers less disposable without substantially affecting growth (see: European tech hubs).
Sorry, but you shot your argument in the foot with this example. The last two months of Europeans trying with great difficulty to replace US tech with local tech have shown just how little tech has grown in Europe relative to the US. Is that because of their labor laws? Unclear. But it's certainly not a shining example of success.
The effort to replace US tech is not anything similar to the European tech industry.
US technology has a hegemony because we were first to the party, our economy is larger, and our laws are hostile to newcomers (lack of interoperability requirements, lack of enforcement of anti-trust laws, strong defense of DMCA laws, non-competes, and trade secret laws).
I've worked in the EU tech sector. They have tons of startups that operate just like US startups: VC funded, hockey-stick growth, and hiring like crazy. Their stricter labor laws don't get in the way of that.
The hyper-growth, VC-funded startup model is itself quite exploitative, but if it's still possible with stricter labor laws, then fears about them impacting growth are unfounded.
>I've worked in the EU tech sector. They have tons of startups that operate just like US startups: VC funded, hockey-stick growth, and hiring like crazy.
Which are those EU start-ups growing like crazy?
Oh, we're talking about bubbly VC growth and not actual GDP growth or growth of sustainable businesses or new useful products. In that case, I suppose I concede.
[dead]
When I was a high school teacher you either had to belong to the union (CTA) or pay the same dues anyway, and the difference was that they didn't let you vote. I felt that about 90% of the dues were used against me and the students. That was the other big reason I quit, besides the low pay, which the union didn't fix. So I moved on to become a much higher paid developer who has zero pressure to join a union.
My dad was a big union guy. He never crossed a picket line, hated a scab, voted straight Democrat, and put the decal on his tool box. But growing up I saw his own union (IBEW) treat him like shit as he became an employer, and cheat him out of half of his pension. He praised unions while circumventing his own to stay in business.
If unions catch up to me, like the barbed wire caught up to the old cowboys, I'll go look for greener pastures. I'm happier making my own deal with the boss.
> When I was a high school teacher you either had to belong to the union (CTA) or pay the same dues anyway
The Unions that created this system essentially became the system themselves. The government will sure like it and stamp over it. If the Union gets paid regardless, then it'll essentially become useless. Unions where the syndicate has to fight for its salary will act as paid gangoons. They are essentially the police version of the workers.
It's almost like humans universally will use systems of power to further their own aims, rather than altruistic ends. And those who do have an advantage in the accumulation of that power.
> I'm happier making my own deal with the boss.
And i bet your boss is even happier!
You say this like it's some kind of zinger, but software engineers that actually negotiate their salaries generally earn more than those who don't.
Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode" (I moved from academia over a decade ago, and I know the difference). This blog post tries to paint it differently - and it feels like it lacks perspective compared to virtually any other occupation.
> We’re living in a world where billion dollar tech companies expect us to live and breathe code, demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion."
Yet, it is up to us. In some software jobs (AAA game dev and a certain type of startup), you are expected to crunch beyond limits. In other places, you can have a typical 40h/week job at a salary way better than the average 9-5 job. Or you can freelance a dozen hours a week and live in a remote cottage. Or work from Thailand when it's winter. Or take a gap year to regenerate, or reinvent, yourself.
Not many career choices support this freedom. In some (e.g., medical careers), grind is not optional—you won't finish university, you won't get established, and that's the end of the story. In many other jobs, if you were freelancing a dozen hours a week, you would literally not be able to afford food. In many professions, quitting means the end of a career - or at least a serious setback; in tech, it means getting many messages on LinkedIn.
Don't get me wrong - I am all for criticism of grind and exploitation. But let's not paint ourselves, members of one of the most privileged occupations, as victims of the global system.
In my experience as a software engineer rounding out 6 years now, what I have observed in myself and others is that the work pressure that leads to burnout in SWEs is largely self-imposed.
I have some conjectures as to why that may be:
1. High variability of pay, not only between companies but within companies. As a SWE your total compensation can be expected to double every two promotions, and promotions can be pretty fast. Promotions are also not purely a function of tenure like other professions with steep comp growth such as pilots.
2. "This is too good to be true" syndrome. You show up at your comfy 250k job with catered lunch, dinner, and maxed out benefits. After the first month, your workload is about 3-4 hours a day. Everything is flexible - the time you show up, the time you leave, the days you choose to come in to the office, what you wear. Everyone is smart and nice. Free snacks. Imposter syndrome and paranoia set in. Am I doing enough? Should I look at this P2 prod bug on a Satuday? I guess I only worked 20 hours last week so it's fair to work a couple of hours on the weekend. Everything I do needs to be perfect or they could've just hired someone in India for 1/10th my pay, right? etc. Then it snowballs. (I'm probably just describing imposter syndrome.)
In reality nothing really happens if you slow down and do things at a comfortable pace. Most managers want to cultivate reliable people who take long-term deep ownership, not productivity machines that just bang out features. If they needed more output, they'd just hire one more person.
With 25 years experience, the other thing is environments vary a lot, even within a single company. Things can be dysfunctional for lots of reasons, sometimes due to individual incompetence at various points in the hierarchy, or just systemic/cultural issues that no one has the vision or influence to identify and fix. When you're young and inexperienced, but technically brilliant, it's easy to miss the forest for the trees of what's really going on on the human side of things of any large group effort.
One of the things I value the most about working at startups in my early career is that it allows relatively "junior" folks more exposure to the big picture, and thus stay grounded in reality and not swayed by all the random narratives that are floated around in the corporate world. No matter how smart you are, or how honest and well intentioned the intent of the speaker, it takes experience to be able to parse through these and understand when and how they are relevant to your individual work. I see a lot of folks over the last 15 years who got hired into big tech during boom times, never got anywhere near the critical path of the business, and were exposed to all manner dysfunction by ambitious but incompetent social climbers who swelled the ranks of anything with the whiff of success. In these types of environment, people who just want to do good software engineering work can easily get swept into various dead end buckets of learned helpless, rest-and-vest, burnout, etc.
This leads to a more fundamental observation.
That if unionization is so cleary net positive for most workplaces, then it wouldn’t need any sustained agitation campaigns in the first place.
As any company that unionizes would near automatically gain a huge competitive advantage.
> That if unionization is so cleary net positive for most workplaces, then it wouldn’t need any sustained agitation campaigns in the first place.
> As any company that unionizes would near automatically gain a huge competitive advantage.
No, your "observation" has a fundamental flaw: There's no general "net positive for most workplaces," because different groups have different interests.
Unionization is a "net negative" for certain groups (managers, owners) and a "net positive" for others (employees, if done right). That's why there are sustained agitation campaigns against it.
We (especially those with an entrepreneurial bent like so many of us frequenting this site in particular) have so effectively been sold the illusion that class no longer exists that most have us have genuinely become blind to the idea that a company's interests (i.e. the interests of owners, shareholders, the board, investors, whatever - maximizing profits or ROI) and a worker's interests (e.g. a sustainable, stable and reliable income with potential for career advancement providing access to better pay/perks) usually run directly opposite to each other. Class conflict is inherent to the employer-employee or owner-worker dynamic. You can merely afford the luxury of pretending it doesn't exist when it's in their interest (i.e. doing so aligns with their goals, usually in the short-term) to "pamper" you - and that era may be drawing to a close within our lifetimes.
Every single worker is ultimately disposable. If you think your employer is disposable to you, that's not because you're special but because so far you've been extremely lucky. It is far easier for a company to replace a worker than it is for a worker to replace the company they work for - we just tend to see the "inability to find a new job" as a personal failure (i.e. bad performance at the job of "finding a job") whereas we take the existence of job vacancies for granted as a normal part of the market and maybe even a positive indicator for "growth" (which we define as desirable even if it's artificial or unsustainable).
It should also be pointed out that it's not just the money aspect. Managing people is difficult, managing people in a stressful situation is really difficult, add a dysfunctional culture (especially if that culture is "imposed" from above) is a pain in the proverbial. Which means managing in these situations is hard work.
Add on top of that that a largish number of managers just plain suck at their job, so being in a union can be useful to push back against either lazy or incompetent managers.
Because there are far more people who leave their manager than leave their job.
This seems like a tautology, of course there can not be a general rule for all workplaces.
By definition with sufficiently seperate interests, then anything (or nothing) goes.
Tell me you've never read history without...etc
We generally don't let markets choose rights
Yeah we do…? political power can also be traded in markets, subject to market forces, etc.
Maybe not 100% of the time in 100% of societies, but certainly more than zero in every society I’ve ever heard of.
This is an interesting take, but I have a slightly different take. My ding dong company pays everyone including myself, salaries that are way too high. They gave ne a 30% raise I didn't even ask for or expect. We get a contract to do X, which say should take a team of 5 folks. However, we can only staff the contract with 3 folks because our salaries are too high. Now, we're all working 80hr weeks and stressed to the max because we really need more fresh minds on the challenge.
Now, we're in a contract lull, so some of us are only charging part time (75%), while actually working overtime.
It's bananas.
The solution seems obvious. Decrease salaries and increase company stock offerings. Then, if you and your colleagues care to work harder and deliver outstanding product, your stock value will rise over time and you'll be a.) more wealthy than taking 'dumb' money, and b.) more physically and mentally healthy.
Simple conclusions
a) the people who have the stock now want to keep it and be more wealthy
b) they don’t have much regard for your physical or mental health
Really weird that my comment was downvoted. No idea why.
I guess HN just isn't for me after 10 years. Peace out.
People do stuff like skim, see 'decrease salaries' and click down without really thinking or even reading it all. It can be kinda random and not worth worrying about.
I think it’s an interesting comment. Hard to not take that kind of thing personally though.
I take it extremely personally, after all, I'm talking about voluntarily decreasing my own salary to achieve better work life balance in the present.
However, decreasing salary != decreased total compensation.
Increase equity shares + decrease salary = improved work-life balance now and much healthier retirement in the future.
Nah, there are people that run companies here, too. Many of them drink the cool-aide.
It happens, I wouldn’t sweat it
> In my experience as a software engineer rounding out 6 years now, what I have observed in myself and others is that the work pressure that leads to burnout in SWEs is largely self-imposed.
This is how control works in our society. It's true for all people.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han explains it well in "The Burnout Society".
> the work pressure that leads to burnout in SWEs is largely self-imposed
Nothing happens in a vacuum and this "self-imposed" work pressure often happens within the a company culture that is either intentionally or accidentally highly demanding of individuals. The "self-imposed" is a false front for enforced expectations from colleagues, managers and clients.
We're all in unique situations and you can say if you don't like it then don't work there. However the hustle and start up cultures are viral and spread throughout the industry. Just look at all the talk of Elon Musk & his Twitter and Doge employees working 100 hours weeks and sleeping at the office. Regardless of politics, there are many people who talk about this insane, unhealthy and inefficient level of work as a good and worthy thing. It's the Puritan work ethic myth. In reality the majority of the benefit of this work does not go to the individual doing the work, instead they pay a heavy cost with their quality of life.
I'd add 3: most of us really like this stuff. Sometimes I get pinged in the evening for some issue. I have the freedom to say I'll check it out in the morning, or on Monday. Sometimes I do, but often I'll look at it. There's definitely a little bit of 2 in there, but mostly it's because checking it out is fun, and solving it is rewarding.
I try not to overdo it. You can still burn out from that sort of thing even if you like it. But as long as it's not excessive, I enjoy the occasional "Sorry it's late, but are you around to take a look at this?"
I've legit never known of a place that hires SWEs that matches this description.
Except maybe the sweet gig SWEs got at Twitter before Musk.
No wonder you'd feel imposter syndrome if you'd landed a gig that good. Anyone would.
this doesnt apply to 90% of programming jobs so im not so sure the money growth expectation disilusion angle is right.
I generally assume it is due to lack of agency.
> This blog post tries to paint it differently - and it feels it lacks perspective with virtually any other occupations.
On one hand, misery and happiness are relative. On the other hand, try telling a construction worker how hard our lives are sitting in chairs clicking buttons.
My dad used to have to do things like hot tar roofing to pay the bills. So I still consider it a blessing to get to work in software.
I think one thing that needs to be understood better is the concept of "burnout". I think it's wrong to equate it with "working hard". I've known farmers and restaurateurs who work insane hours for decades and never think about burning out. On the other hand, I have felt burned out 3 weeks into a job where I did nothing. I think it has little to do with how hard we work and everything to do with our perception of progress.
I think burnout is Cool Hand Luke being forced to dig a ditch and fill it back up again, for days.
It’s putting in effort without seeing anything concrete to show for it.
If you tar a roof, you can see a roof that will keep out the rain. If you cook a meal, you see someone who was hungry but now full. A lot of jobs don’t have that feedback loop.
I think too, is the cost of taking work home.
Many jobs, including construction, service jobs, even many medical jobs, do not require even the thought of work outside of working hours.
Anecdotally many in these positions that I am friends with will attest that it's great to get off work and pretend work didn't happen and go on with their real life, because they don't have deadlines or projects to stress over, arduous performance reviews, or extensive office politicking and empire-building.
>I think one thing that needs to be understood better is the concept of "burnout".
I can explain it pretty well.
You can classify pretty much all jobs into 2 categories - map lookups and reasoning.
A map lookup job is something where you learn to associate a specific problem with a solution. Most jobs are like this. You go work in construction, its pretty much map lookup - supervisor tells you to go prep the concrete, you know the procedure to do it, you go do it. Even high end jobs like VPs are often map lookups, you aren't really thinking about solving any problems, just following the standard procedure of what works and are essentially relying on the actual work of lower ranked people to give you data.
Reasoning jobs are those where you don't have the solution for a particular problem in memory, so you figure it out. For example, business strategy, despite being non technical, is a reasoning problem - there are a lot of variables you have to consider, and success in this regard often involves things like figuring out what you have to do, which is a separate task than actually doing it.
Software engineering is interesting because it can be both. Setting up standard service stacks is often a map lookup job. The interviews themselves test on map lookup really, as most of the problems fall within the scope of pointer manipulation or n-linked lists, with memorizing specific hard ones in case you get asked those. But fundamentally, software development is a reasoning type job.
The burnout happens when someone in software engineering is good at map lookup, but is actually needed to do reasoning, and has no education or training on how to do the latter. For example, I worked at Amazon. Id estimate that if I asked a random sample of 100 engineers to give me http traffic from a service, 1 out of 100 of them would know how to do it, and only about 10 or so would be able to actually go figure it out on their own.
This is why people who are good at reasoning can really do any job well. If you take a software engineer who is extremely competent and can build complex solutions, and make them in charge of optimizing things like delivery, shipping and warehouse storage, or finance management of a company (excluding the emotional response to those jobs), they would be able to do it well.
Whereas people who are good at map lookups tend to be only good at certain jobs in certain quantities.
My experience with burnout doesn't really gel with this. I find map lookup style tasks as you describe them pretty draining and the reasoning tasks relatively more energising.
But generally what actually causes burnout for me is a sense of pointlessness, that the work is nothing but the pay because it's, for example, just some B2B finance adjacent system or something.
Great comments from both of you. I will also add the (unsupportive) environment and uncertainty for the future as major factors IMHO.
One should also consider the "outside" environment. We jumped from covid right into war without a break in between and now we are being told that we will be replaced by AI, while expecting the stock market to crash and increase unemployment. Ah and also the inflation (wage reduction) that has been going on for the last five years and doesn't show a sign of stopping.
I don't think thats burnout, its more like apathy. I am the same way. When I worked for Amazon, I spend half sundays writing scripts that almost automated my map look up tasks (like stuff for oncall)
Burnout is when you are overworked with regular activities that you see no other way to accomplish.
It’s exactly the opposite. Burnout happens when a person with high reasoning skills is not allowed to actually used them and forced into map lookup tasks (most commonly with a useless, here be dragons kind of map).
This is exactly my experience. I like to think I'm a decent thinker. I've spent the past 6 months basically in constant burnout, started smoking again and am up to a pack a day now, because my job is "we're going to tell you that you have ownership over this perimeter, and then give you basically zero leeway in how to do things. You have to do it this way because that's what the senior architect with the hard-on for every new DevOps tool has decided. You thought that db migration could be done with just a simple script and modifying a few API endpoints? Lol No, we're using Temporal. Wait,why do you keep telling us you want to quit and go back to doing maths research?"
Being given responsibility without the authority is an increasing trend in this industry.
Why do companies hire self-directed SMEs for six figures, only to put them in a micromanagement box and override their advice?
I would argue if you are actually good at reasoning, you can easily optimize and make the map lookup tasks efficient and automated. Unless the environment doesn't allow you to do so.
> I can explain it pretty well.
You don’t need to.
The WHO has already done so:
https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupat...
The problem is that everybody just makes up their own definition.
Eh, your definition implies people who are actually skilled (i.e. able to do "reasoning" jobs) don't/can't suffer from burnout. I'd bet there are cases of the opposite of what you describe, where people would be able to solve problems with reasoning, but get burnt out from being locked into a map-lookup structure. Or cases where people are good at, or enjoy, reasoning about one type of problem, but then get thrown into a different field they're not as attuned to or interested in.
I’ve heard a similar jobs classification but in 3 buckets:
1. builders (maps to reasoning)
2. fixers
3. maintainers (maps to map lookups)
Companies are often a mixture of these 3 classifications. How they skew often depends on maturity (startup vs enterprise).
In terms of mental process, whenever someone is performing a task, they are looking up information on either directly how to do the task, or are running some thought process (i.e simulation of the world) to figure out some unknown.
Its an interesting analogy, but that ain't it.
Ive been burned out and am VERY good at reasoning. In fact, my burnout was largely because my role went from relatively undisturbed reasoning most of the time with long, but not extreme hours, to extreme hours where I was actively punished for reasoning - all while being micromanaged and pulled in many directions.
And yet, if I had found the new role to be meaningful and, moreover, with and for decent people (rather than a psychopath), I could totally have done all of that.
Burnout comes from when your life has no meaning and, worse, your attempts to find/create meaning are prevented (or worse).
"Those who have a why to live can endure almost any how"
> On the other hand, try telling a construction worker how hard our lives are sitting in chairs clicking buttons.
Construction workers usually chose to do that job instead of call center, cashier or elderly care for instance. The perception of what's stressful or "hard" is I think different (illegal workers who can't do these jobs in the first place being another can of worms)
I also think this is the same perspective for burnout, repetitively doing something that is felt as mind crushing will be a trigger, but what is felt as mind cushing vastly depend on individuals, preferences and predispositions. I don't think there's a single yardstick for that.
I did physical labour when I was younger in a tropical climate and in certain ways it's easier than my SWE job is now.
There are days in SWE where I feel completely and utterly drained and brain dead despite doing nothing but just "clicking buttons". The physical exercise from the job site in comparison was heaven a lot of the time, and even these days when I'm stuck in my 4th useless meeting of the day, I find myself yearning for shovelling in the scorching sun.
> My dad used to have to do things like hot tar roofing to pay the bills. So I still consider it a blessing to get to work in software.
It is a blessing, but it’s also important to recognize who tends to end up in the tech industry.
Many of us are well-suited for software work because disabilities or other constraints make many other careers inaccessible.
The alternative is poverty.
IMO, this is a bad take. I've been in this industry long enough to have heard all the arguments presented here before— it's the classic ones: "pay is good", "not all jobs are bad", "others have it worse", etc.
We're in a strategic industry with lots of investment, and a lot of us who check Hacker News have good enough resumes to be in demand, but this doesn't change the fact we —software engineers as a whole— are workers. We might be well-paid, but we're still working class.
If you go outside the top-school bubble, or the usa-tech bubble, this is more evident. Take the money and generous stock grants away and the job is basically indistinguishable from any other white-collar job. Most software developers around the world can't work from Thailand when it's winter. Or take a gap year to reinvent themselves. Or find freelance work that'd allow them to live comfortably with only a dozen hours of work a week.
The incentive of companies is always to have their workers produce more, for less. Thankfully in the USA especially the stars are aligned to give "top software engineering talent" enough leverage to enjoy career mobility and cushy pay. We're at the right place at the right time.
The incentive of companies is always to have their workers produce more for less, and trust me, they're trying. It might be AI, it might be a growing supply of developers, it might be a change in investment strategies— that "top software engineering talent" pool will shrink and a lot of developers will be hit with the realization they weren't some permanent exception in the system. We might feel like we're part of the bourgeoisie because we get big cheques from the companies we work for, but we're much closer factory-line work than a lot of people realize.
Being a worker doesn't mean "working class". That phrase pretty specifically is for people who do some sort of physical work. We fall under "professional class", people who mostly do knowledge work, traditionally at a desk in an office. They're both generally considered part of the middle class.
This is just blue collar vs white collar. Both are working class, as they're both primarily earning their livelihood by exchanging labor for wage.
you can put a lipstick on a pig with some linkedin lingo like “professional class” or “working professional” but that is just for bars to impress boys/girls. end of the day you are worker and working class. the fact that you might be in the office while someone is out enjoying the sun at the construction site is just geography
In the original Marxist meaning, the working class is anybody who exchanges their labor (physical or otherwise) for a wage (hourly or salaried). This is defined in opposition to the bourgeoisie, who control the means of production and earn money from the labor of others.
There's no reason why tech unions can't have solidarity with other unionization efforts (and there are thousands of reason why we should have that solidarity).
Us tech workers could be leveraging the privilege we have to get better conditions for everyone.
A perfect example is non-compete clauses. Tech workers enjoy high job mobility, which is only hindered by non-competes. It's no accident that major tech hubs were some of the first states to ban them, helping all workers.
> Us tech workers could be leveraging the privilege we have to get better conditions for everyone.
Yes.
A bit of context here: I am European and take for granted many things related to social safety (healthcare, benefits, parental leave, or various sorts) and equal opportunity (free education, public transportation, etc.). Many views of Bernie Sanders are mainstream by European standards (vide https://www.quora.com/How-far-to-the-left-is-Bernie-Sanders-...).
Yet, in Poland, there are various lower taxes for software engineers (and some other similar professionals). I don't consider it fair. Yes, many people feel that they work hard (and they do!) or that their friends earn even more.
But at the same time, it takes talking with anyone in education, retail, or care to see that what is considered unacceptable pay for any IT job is, for many, a dream salary. While inequality is not nearly as enormous as in the US, it is still.
So yes, if these are system changes that benefit all workers - wonderful!
> A perfect example is non-compete clauses.
Yes.
In Europe, you are often paid by the previous employer if you have such a clause. So, it only makes sense in a reasonable case where you could directly pass know-how on to the competitors. But not as a leash.
I can't relate to "easy mode" past the layoffs. Everything has turned into a nightmare with employer expectations. Everyone I speak to feels the same. Things are not the way they are.
Absurd Schedules - Yes
Unrealistic Deadlines - Yes
Competing Colleageues -Yes
Toxic environment - Yes
Hard to switch - Yes
Outsourcing - Yes
Training your replacements -Yes
How is this easy mode? Mental labor can be as bad or even worse than Physical labor. Atleast you hit a brick wall with physical. Your enemy is inivisible when its mental.
> How is this easy mode
There's jobs where you work 80 hours per week to maybe make $50-60k, and are so physical your body will be shot by 40 or 50...
Devs get compensated extremely well.
So what? Because somebody has it worse means billionaires can exploit us without recourse?
Because that's the alternative. Either we advocate or they take more and more
It's fine to demand more. I'm a believer in market power.
But have some perspective, there's a ton of far worse jobs...
The problem with the "it could be worse" line of thinking is it ignores that it could also be better.
Yes, there are far worse jobs. Yes, being a slave is infinitely worse than being a software engineer.
But that's like saying "oh, using 3G isn't that bad, dial-up is worse." Sure, but if you can get fiber-optic, that's better. A lot better. And you'll do better work that way (assuming you use the internet in your work, which, if you're a dev, you probably do).
"Oh, running our entire infrastructure on a 10 year old ThinkPad isn't that bad, it could be worse, we could have a PDP-11". Sure, and you could also rent a beast of a server from OVH/Hetzner/etc for relatively cheap, and that might make life a little nicer, for you, and for your customers.
If you've got half your workforce burning out, that's a fucking issue, and while yes, compared to 99% of jobs that ever existed (medival peasant, prostitute, garbage man, street musician, cashier) this is quite nice, if people keep developing mental health issues as a result of it, that's an issue.
And in that case, if the "market solution" is basically unionize to demand better conditions...
The problem with saying "market power" is that it implicitly condones that those with money are correct since they have influence over the market.
Workers can't influence markets like the billionaire class, that's why they need to be heavily regulated with social protections enshrined in law.
My initial reaction to this whole thing was the same as yours (not that I have any love lost for academics). Software engineers do basically no physical labor and usually get paid better than many people who physically work way harder. On the whole, software engineers are not "the victim," as you said.
However, your examples made me think.
> In other places, you can have a typical 40h/week job at a salary way better than the average 9-5 job.
Can you? Can everyone? I've job hunted before and known many more people who've taken way longer than me to find a position at all, in several different locations throughout the country (not coastal metropolises). You're kind of suggesting that unemployment isn't an issue in the industry, which is a pretty blanketed take.
> Or you can freelance a dozen hours a week and live in a remote cottage.
Can you meet friends while living in a remote cottage? Can you raise kids well in a remote cottage? (Does the remote cottage even have internet?) This one is technically true, but ignores many of the reasons most people work/live in the first place. I say that as someone who's considered going that route.
So while I agree software engineers aren't a "victim class" as compared to other industries, I also think using the "it could be worse" excuse to avoid working for better conditions that are totally feasible isn't a great thing to do. The majority of software engineers are middle-class, and when the middle-class is under attack, they're going down with the rest of the ship, not up. Perhaps it'd be better to foster a little more solidarity instead of inviting us vs. them mentality.
No industry has 0% unemployment. Most people would kill for the employability of the median software engineer.
This isn’t wrong. In every industry, there will always be people who struggle to find employment. It’s a necessary part of the economic machine. One hopes it is not always the same person suffering, of course.
Still, absolutely everything about this industry is inflated. Pepsi just bought Poppi for $1.5B. That’s a HUGE DEAL, but hardly worth mentioning when compared with the $70B that Microsoft spent on Activision-Blizzard.
Making $80k a year is a GREAT salary. That’s going to invoke a hearty yawn from many when comparing to dev salaries.
Hell, you don’t even need a degree to get in. Just the knowledge to back yourself up in an interview.
I’m old enough to remember the hiring frenzy of the dot-com bubble, as well as many smaller hiring frenzies since.
Having watched my parents claw their way to a very happy retirement, it’s insane how easy life is in this career field.
I bring great energy to my teams, but technically I’m not incredible. I’ve never been Big-N quality. Still, I’m going to retire earlier in my life than my dad, who (very regrettably) even got an infusion of life insurance cash via my mom’s passing. I’ll retire with more spending power too. I have one nice toy - a car I spent $45k on. Otherwise, I live a modest life on my income, but all of this is based on watching my parents’ spending habits and lifestyle, so it feels like a fair comparison to me at least.
This is an absolutely blessed field. Can’t imagine where I’d be if I’d been born even just a hundred years ago.
> Making $80k a year is a GREAT salary. That’s going to invoke a hearty yawn from many when comparing to dev salaries.
I'd like to draw a distinction here:
$80k is very good, by the standards of what most people can get.
$80k is middling-to-poor compared to how fast the cost of living is going up. Housing prices are skyrocketing, people have no savings, can't afford emergencies.
The economy is leaving people behind. In my area, SWE pay moves closer to "normal difficulty" every year, while everyone else moves to "hard".
My starting salary was a not-extravagant $55K 25 years ago when .coms were handing out $100K+ to CS grads. That's $100K today. $80K is exceedingly low even for juniors in a highly skilled profession
The real issue is that companies aren't willing to increase pay even with the rate of inflation. This isn't a controversial take.
So yeah, you may be loyal to the company, and you may show loyalty by coming to all the "mandatory fun" events as well as the "all hands meetings." But the reality is that they pay the minimum what they can get away with. And the more loyal you are, the more they can pay less.
If you think about it, on one hand it's a market based approach -- which is probably the right answer for management to do. On the other hand, if there's no incentive for you to go out of your way, you won't. Nor will you work harder if all you're going to get is a %2 pay raise, even though the last year you closed on average 3 tickets per work day.
There's a lot of places in America where $80k is not a great salary. Unfortunately, as much of America slides further and further right people who don't fit the right's ideal have to be more and more selective about where they live.
Outside of, like, the 6 most expensive cities in the richest nation on the planet, where is this true in the US?
The nation has like 4 million square miles - we can focus on more than 80 of them.
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How much experience with contract killers do you have to make that assessment?
Most "contract killers" aren't the super pro movie kind. (Though I'm sure they exist.) Most are young guys, or children even, doing sloppy hit-n-runs to climb some gang hierarchy for really not a lot of money.
I agree with the theory, but have zero facts to back them up.
I’d also argue that we shouldn’t call “I’ll give you $50 coke money if you off that guy” should be called “contract killing”.
Is that data that's generally available somewhere??
I wonder whether you could extrapolate off other industries.
IE things like sports or music where the top 1% make f*k-you money and the rest either get by or struggle. Do they have to do the occasional public performance to build hype?
Or maybe it's more like a tradie. I always thought Leon:The Professional was a story about an apprenticeship, not that movies are a source of truth on real life.
Probably not per hour.
Absolutely per hour, you'd be surprised how cheap can kill people in many areas of the world, even the rich ones.
Software developers, unlike many other professions, can be self taught at almost no cost. You don't need a license, you don't need to pass any qualifying/gatekeeping exams, you don't need expensive tools, you don't need any supplies or inventory. Consequently there is a never-ending supply of new young developers who are hungrier than you and will do the work for less or do more work for the same.
Software engineers do basically no physical labor
I developed debilitating tendinitis in both wrists right about the time I graduated college. A decade later, I developed a bulged disc in my neck that ended my career.
There are very real risks to your body from sitting at a computer, deep in thought all day. There's a whole other swath of health issues, too, beside injury risks.
Take some responsibility for your own health. You're not chained to your desk; get up and walk around occasionally. Go for a run or hit a quick gym session during your lunch break.
I started having wrist pain years ago and switched to an ergonomic split keyboard years ago which completely fixed that problem. Little laptop keyboard are terrible for any extensive typing.
Take some responsibility for your own health.
Thank you for the lecture about problems I solved decades ago.
I started having wrist pain years ago and switched to an ergonomic split keyboard
Oh, wooow, such sage advice. If you spend some time dealing with repetitive stress injuries, you'll learn that causes and solutions vary tremendously.
Little laptop keyboard are terrible for any extensive typing.
Why are you telling me this?
I'm telling you this because I'm a nice guy and like to help people. Cheers.
How does a union help you with your wrists?
Why do you need help?
I type every single day and I don't want your health problem placing limits on my job flexibility and career advancement.
If our industry fills with unions, suddenly I won't be able to job hop to positions that look interesting to me. I'll have to consider things like seniority and tenure and a bunch of artificial rules. It'll be like going back to high school. I prefer to break rules, color outside the lines, and set my own path.
In normal countries, the role of unions is to ensure that your rights and livelihood are secured when your body or mind sustains damage from a work injury.
It sounds like your idea about what unions are and do are deeply informed by abnormal circumstances.
Perhaps that's why I've met so many engineers from these normal countries in my own, abnormally wealthy one.
In fact, they've told me so, in so many words.
Engineering salaries in Europe are held back compared to the US by market forces (notably lack of investment), not unions. Unions representing highly educated workers do not typically engage in collective bargaining on salary, but rather supply legal aid and continuing education. It’s useful to have an army of lawyers on your side when the MBAs in charge try to cheat you and take away that promised equity, just to take one example.
In general it’s surprisingly difficult to compare salaries, because the US is a complete anomaly here. The tech bubble, stock inflation, real estate prices in SF and NY, student debt are all contributing factors.
In my anecdotal experience, there is little difference in actual disposable income for software engineers in the US and North West Europe, even when one makes $200,000/year and the other makes €100,000/year.
Good one, moved from France to Hong Kong, can confirm. We all move to non-unionized countries to finally be free to make money. When we go back, ofc we're all like "oh yeah you're so right, protect your right to work 35 hours, the boss is evil anyway" :D
> I type every single day and I don't want your health problem placing limits on my job flexibility and career advancement.
You live in a society. All I'm hearing is I need to vote to raise taxes to bring you back down to reality.
So it will be.
yes? pretty sure state-sponsored healthcare is going to be much better, both for individual and population, than the current mess that US has.
You should not require unions just to get help with your health problems.
Having healthcare tied to employment is antithetical to the most basic principles of our economy: people should be able to freely and easily change jobs and/or pause employment--that is the "free" in free market.
Take a break from work?
In another comment you humblebragged that you made almost a 10 figure exit. Good for you and your success.
> I type every single day and I don't want your health problem placing limits on my job flexibility and career advancement.
And you're punching down at someone who didn't have the genes you had?
Would you like to remove all of the benefits unions have given you?
Working nights and weekends got me a close to ten figure exit at a now publicly traded fintech. So yeah, I don't mind.
Rather than retiring on that money, I'm back at it again, and I'm working even harder.
I know what mediocrity and complacency is. I've worked surrounded by it, and I'll do anything to avoid it. I don't want that bullshit where coworkers strive to do the minimum and everybody plays hot potato to see who will take responsibility.
I'll take responsibility. And I'll take the high comp that comes with it. Not have some union pencil in my salary band according to arbitrary rules that don't directly map to solving customer problems.
> Working nights and weekends got me a close to ten figure exit at a now publicly traded fintech. So yeah, I don't mind.
It's an entirely different matter if you stand to make huge gains if the company succeeds. That is not the majority of jobs in the field. Most of us will never even have the opportunity to be involved in one of those. That's not what this discussion is about.
Great!
But don't enforce that on your underlings. I have such a boss and let me tell you, it sucks!
Your underlings have lives and passions that have nothing to do with you or your work, and more importantly they don't have that founders' equity and opportunity for a 10-figure exit.
If you want that kind of excellence, be prepared to pay for it dearly. Market-rate TCO is not nearly enough.
While I don’t necessarily disagree with the larger point on mediocrity, that’s a massive instance of survivorship bias. For every you there’s a hundred others that burned themselves out only for them to be fired a moment after.
Oh, this person isn’t a worker class. They’re managerial class spreading essentially propaganda against something that would threaten them,
I've always been an IC.
If you got a 10 figure exit then you're not working class.
I'm such a scatter brained dumbass sometimes. I meant "near 8 figures". I'm nowhere near "three commas" of wealth. I was emotionally responding to these pro-union comments between work and can't simple math.
I still can't fathom the headspace of people wanting to do less and be entitled to more while the rest of the world is catching up and offering a better value. The lasier we get, the less likely we'll be picked to do the work. And this is such a goddamned cushy job. Are we so fucking entitled we're complaining about our career? Seriously?
I also can't reason about why people think this is about money rather than building cool shit. If this is your hobby and you enjoy building, why wouldn't you want to do this? Especially if you pick your problem space?
Why are there so many people like this on a startup forum? Shouldn't everyone here be hustling and working hard? I don't get this attitude, and I don't want people like that on my team to drag me down.
I support this because precisely because it is not everyone's hobby, even if it is mine. I have more than enough money. Some people do not. And I assure you it's not because they are lazier or dumber than I am.
> I also can't reason about why people think this is about money rather than building cool shit.
I'm working to make money to pay my mortgage, put food on the table, save for retirement, and build a better life for my small family. That is the motivation that keeps me showing up.
If I want to build cool shit then I'll do it on my own time. Unfortunately, not everyone can build a startup.
The fact that you think a union only exists to "drag (you) down" speaks a lot about you.
Please. You don't make 10 figures on your work.
Its how you exploit other people is where you get $1,000,000,000 or a billion worth.
What? You claim to have gotten a nearly 10 figure exit, yet you claim you made 450 k$ TC in your last job [1]. Even a maximally conservative estimate of 100,000,001 $ for a “nearly 10 figure exit” (being literally 1 dollar over 9 figures) would get you over 4 M$ annually in risk free treasuries. Why would you work for 450 k$?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43429259
Maybe he's counting decimal places too?
Yeah, I fucked that up [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43431883
Cross-posted to LinkedIn?
This is funny, but not the type of comment we really want here. Comments should get more substantive the deeper down a tree you go.
As cringe as LinkedIn can sometimes be, I certainly relate more to it than to r/antiwork.
Imagine putting your time and energy into something other than building a bigger imaginary pile for yourself.
You made close to a billion dollars?
How does a union help you with your wrists?
I have no idea why you replied to me with this irrelevant nonsense, but a unions regularly protect injured workers from being fired (often for fabricated reasons). This is also why companies love illegal immigrants. When José loses a finger at the cannery, management just slips him a bus ticket back to Mexico and mentions that if he comes back they'll have to call immigration about some irregularities.
I was lucky enough that this happened before the modern era of cutthroat corporate behavior, and I was able to get physical therapy and ergonomic changes to fix the problem.
I type every single day and I don't want your health problem placing limits on my job flexibility and career advancement.
Again, WTF are you even talking about? What union? How does this imaginary union inhibit your ability to change jobs?
All I did was point out that sedentary jobs still have plenty of injury risk.
> unions regularly protect injured workers from being fired (often for fabricated reasons). This is also why companies love illegal immigrants. When José loses a finger at the cannery, management just slips him a bus ticket back to Mexico and mentions that if he comes back they'll have to call immigration about some irregularities.
You are describing factory work. This has no relevancy to our career. We are in one of the cushiest job sectors on the planet currently.
I have literally never seen anything in my entire professional career in software that would necessitate a union to "protect" us. My last employer gave us massages at work, FFS, and I've always had flexible working hours where I can show up at the office pretty much any time I want.
I had a few colleagues develop carpal tunnel and work always provided time off, medical benefits, special accommodations, standing desks, monitor risers, ergo keyboards, etc.
> Again, WTF are you even talking about? What union? How does this imaginary union inhibit your ability to change jobs?
Sorry, most of this thread is about unions and I accidentally roped you into that. I don't want the specter of carpel tunnel to be a rationalization for unions.
Unions are a tool to prevent abuse of workers. We do not have a systemic issue with that in our field - conversely, we have one the cushiest careers on the planet.
I don't want us to install unions. There's very little reason to do so, and it'll damage the incredibly cushy status quo we have going for us:
1. Union seniority often means you have to stay at the same job or within the same set of employers as your union, which fractures the labor market, leads to unnecessary job specialization, and prevents mobility. This also ossifies institutional knowledge as the free exchange of ideas slows.
2. Union seniority perks mean new employees do the drudge work and senior employees get the perks. This is the wrong incentive alignment.
3. Creating barriers to fire underperforming workers will lead to offshoring. Offshoring will happen naturally as other countries get better at labor export, but unionization will prematurely accelerate this. We shouldn't be seeking to do less than our overseas counterparts, especially when our comp levels remain higher than most other professions. (I'm not biased against folks overseas, just stating that the labor markets will not mix if we don't accelerate it ourselves.)
4. Tech sectors in countries with unions pay workers significantly less and have fewer innovative companies (by volume). The tradeoff for "job security" is not worth it. Currently "job security" is the ability to provide value to your organization, and that works pretty well. This is what I mean by I don't want unions limiting my career - I have a pretty good success rate getting the jobs I want. Unions create a check box of criteria and fence people in.
5. The correct way to mitigate injuries is disability insurance, not unions. Companies shouldn't be saddled with employees that can no longer work. Companies (and employees) should instead pay for disability insurance.
There are a lot of other points, but you can see the outline of my argument. We're creating reasons to be less desirable to employers and installing barriers to career mobility.
If the situation on the ground changes, I might change my mind about unions. But as things currently stand, we still have almost everything going for us.
The real "anti-corporate" issue we should be fighting for is a trust-busting breakup of big tech into smaller firms. The FAANG companies control too much surface area, monopolize their platforms, and create barriers to entry for new companies and new markets - despite their high comp, this is what's putting the most downward pressure on the overall labor market.
> If our industry fills with unions, suddenly I won't be able to job hop to positions that look interesting to me.
Huh? Says who?
>> Software engineers do basically no physical labor
I know this is not like lifing boxes or bricks, but my main labor is a 2+hr commute each way to work -- why?
1. Because so many decent paying tech jobs are close to expensive cities
2. Because the jobs pay well, but not enough to live super close to the offices
3. Even if i lived closed to the office, the jobs are so volatile and changing you'd switch from south bay to SF to Oakland back to Fremont so you cant pick a single spot to live
4. You do this stupid 2hr commute only to go into a phonebooth "office" and sit alone on zoom calls with people in Asia who arent even in the same office
as a once remote cottage guy, yes you can have internet. kids love it out there. you bring your friends.
its better out there man. i miss it.
I was waking up with no alarm to blue sky and chirping birds, and then I could read papers and to pytorch all day. Never heard a car.
> as a once remote cottage guy You imply you no longer live like this. What made you stop?
a sexy adventure. i met a hot japanese girl online. i wanted to meet her but during covid japan was closed. so i enrolled in a year at a japanese language school to get a student visa.
well now we are married, baby is due soon. and i can speak japanese.
in a couple years well be making a slightly larger cottage back in the US and then ill be a cottage man again.
whenever we are having a tough day, we just think of waking up to the blue sky and chirping birds in the countryside. but now the vision includes little feet
Some tangential thoughts and rambles on this to try to get at the deeper issues, first from Jeff Schmidt about his book "Disciplined Minds" which encourages solidarity of intellectual workers: https://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ "Who are you going to be? That is the question. In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy. Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."
An even deeper point though from "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black: https://web.archive.org/web/20080702023453/http://www.whywor... "Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By “play” I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. ..."
Or, from a different direction, from "Buddhist Economics" by EF Schumacher: https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/buddhist-econ... "The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
And also from an even different direction by Marshall Sahlins' "The Original Affluent Society": https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/298-june-19-1979/the-ori... "For there are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be “easily satisfied” either by producing much or desiring little. The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way, makes assumptions peculiarly appropriate to market economies: that man’s wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improvable: thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that “urgent goods” become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own: that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty—with a low standard of living. ... The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization. It has grown with civilization, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation—that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo. ..."
Or from an even different direction as a cautionary tale (spoilers if you read the Wikipedia article beyond what I quoted): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands_... ""With Folded Hands ..." is a 1947 science fiction novelette[1] by American writer Jack Williamson (1908–2006). In writing it, Willamson was influenced by the aftermath of World War II, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his concern that "some of the technological creations we had developed with the best intentions might have disastrous consequences in the long run."[2] ... Despite the humanoids' benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. ..."
Or also touching on that theme, "The Skills of Xanadu" story by Theodore Sturgeon that helped create Ted Nelson's "Xanadu" and hypertext and so indirectly the world wide web: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 https://ia601205.us.archive.org/22/items/theodore-sturgeon-/...
Or also on re-envisioning work and status: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear "The Mayflower II has brought with it thousands of settlers, all the trappings of the authoritarian regime along with bureaucracy, religion, fascism and a military presence to keep the population in line. However, the planners behind the generation ship did not anticipate the direction that Chironian society took: in the absence of conditioning and with limitless robotic labor and fusion power, Chiron has become a post-scarcity economy. Money and material possessions are meaningless to the Chironians and social standing is determined by individual talent, which has resulted in a wealth of art and technology without any hierarchies, central authority or armed conflict. In an attempt to crush this anarchist adhocracy, the Mayflower II government employs every available method of control; however, in the absence of conditioning the Chironians are not even capable of comprehending the methods, let alone bowing to them. The Chironians simply use methods similar to Gandhi's satyagraha and other forms of nonviolent resistance to win over most of the Mayflower II crew members, who had never previously experienced true freedom, and isolate the die-hard authoritarians."
Or more down-to-Earth by Doug Engelbart (creator of the 1960s Mother of All Demos showing interactive collaborative computing and teleconferencing and the mouse): https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/191/ "In Doug Engelbart's terms, an improvement community is any group involved in a collective pursuit to improve a given capability or condition. Some examples include a professional association, a community of practice, consortium, humanitarian initiative, initiatives to reform education, healthcare, government, corporate initiatives, a medical research community seeking to cure a specific disease. An improvement community that also puts focused attention on improving how it engages, and how it improves, by employing better and better practices and tools, is a networked improvement community (NIC)."
Where a "networked improvement community" also connects with Brian Eno's idea of "Scenius": https://medium.com/salvo-faraday/what-is-the-scenius-15409eb... "There’s a common myth that genius is only produced and achieved in isolation. This is commonly referred to as the “Great Man Theory”, that innovation in art and culture only comes from great men working in solitude. Brian Eno, musician, producer, and inventor of the term “scenius”, describes scenius as similar to genius except embedded in a scene rather than in genes. ..."
And by Howard Zinn on "The Coming Revolt of the Guards": https://historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html "The new conditions of technology, economics, and war, in the atomic age, make it less and less possible for the guards of the system-the intellectuals, the home owners, the taxpayers, the skilled workers, the professionals, the servants of government-to remain immune from the violence (physical and psychic) inflicted on the black, the poor, the criminal, the enemy overseas."
Other stuff I have collected on improving organizations (and ourselves): https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations...
Anyway, people can debate on whether unions will improve the day-to-day experience of software developers including regarding "burnout", but that is just scratching the surface of social change related to work compared to ideas like above.
Thank you for maintaining such an interesting, eclectic set of reading materials on the topic. I’ve already skimmed through a few of your suggested readings and I’m sold on your general approach. This is going to be something I keep coming back to over time.
What is the point you're trying to make here? Interesting sources but find it difficult to follow.
Apparently, and if I'm getting that right, that there are many other ways in which societies can organize themselves to produce riches and the arguably undesirable one we've got right now is not unavoidable despite being sold as such.
This is it to me as well
> I also think using the "it could be worse" excuse to avoid working for better conditions that are totally feasible isn't a great thing to do.
Unions fuck up the incentives. Tenured positions are coveted and come with privileges that make the job easier and the position more cushy. New hires want those perks and will rest once they attain them. This is the opposite of what you want in a workforce: you want the top 50% to work hard and fight for raises and promotions.
In our industry, when we don't get the promotions or raises we want, we switch jobs. Job switching has been an incredible means of advancing our careers and being exposed to new tech and new problems. Because of tenure and different jobs using different unions, unions will lead to fewer job changes and more "lifers" that stick around at a single job for a long time. That ossifies code, stops the influx of new ideas and talent, and causes super weird code / business unit ownership drama. It's also super boring.
Tech companies aren't afraid of high salaries (evidently so!) as much as they are of non-fungibility and ossification of the workforce. Unions make slow businesses even slower. Because of this, unions lead to offshoring.
Unions have ground so many industries to a halt in the US. Manufacturing, automotive. Most recently, the film industry (particularly crew) have been offshored -- in the last several years productions have moved to Eastern Europe and Asia sans any US workforce. They fly the cast (without crew) out for the shoots. It's all because of unions.
If we wish this upon ourselves -- in one of the cushiest careers in the world -- we'll soon find all of our jobs moving overseas.
Overseas to countries with better labour laws? Like, it's cheaper to hire engineers in Germany but it's much harder to fire them.
Overseas countries with worse labor laws.
It's the same thing that happens with industrialization.
This will naturally happen over time anyway, but unions will accelerate the trend.
I don't understand how you can make these comments but not thread the needle that the problems you are worried about is strictly the result of capital. Acting as if labor creating a union means Capital should just pack up shop and leave is an extreme power imbalance.
This imbalance not only justifies the need for collective bargaining, but that there should be more regulations wielded against Capital to stop this imbalance.
A flourishing middle class helps a country prosper, a flourishing middle class means a strong labor class where Capital has limits and regulations on what they can inflict against civilians.
The capital flees almost in its entirety to non-union countries once unions grow in power, that's why.
Go ask the IATSE (film) folks how many jobs they're getting this year. (All their jobs left to developing economies in Eastern Europe and Asia. Cast gets flown out, but the crew are hired and based overseas.)
Unions contributed to the decline of US steel, US shipbuilding, US automotive, etc.
A worker can be both fungible and highly compensated. None of us are irreplaceable, and nor should we be. A union tries to put in artificial barriers where businesses need flexibility, and businesses really don't like that.
The union had no choices when capital decides they want more money.
Look at what you're arguing here dude. You're blaming workers for trying to protect their jobs when the issue is that capital is too powerful and needs to be regulated more.
Even more odd you're mentioning shipbuilding an industry that use to have its workers centrally planned by the US government to provide educated skilled labor but was killed off in the 80s by the pro-corpo Reagan admin.
I do agree with you that we should do this more, regulate companies harsher while giving more protections to workers.
> Even more odd you're mentioning shipbuilding an industry that use to have its workers centrally planned by the US government to provide educated skilled labor but was killed off in the 80s by the pro-corpo Reagan admin.
It was killed off by the Jones Act, which "shielded" us from having to be competitive. Tariffs are one lever for establishing fractional protectionism, but the Jones Act was absolute. It essentially turned our industry into the Dodo with no competitive exposure.
> You're blaming workers for trying to protect their jobs when the issue is that capital is too powerful and needs to be regulated more.
The rest of the world is already getting really good at film and entertainment. We're no longer in a blessed position of being number one with a wide margin, and our goods have to compete in a worldwide marketplace. You want to make our product even more expensive to produce at a time when it should be getting cheaper? That's literally going to kill our industry. And then those people will have nowhere to work anyway.
> regulate companies harsher while giving more protections to workers.
This kills the companies, and then there are no jobs.
Companies don't exist to provide jobs. Companies exist to create value for those buying their goods and services. The minute companies stop being about that, they get out-competed.
Jobs and the nature of work changes all the time. Regulations and unions make companies stagnant and ossified. When they're put into straight jackets, they can't move nimbly enough to provide value.
If you want unions, then you must also be a big fan of tariffs. Because switching to domestic only production and keeping our entire market isolationist is the only way an expensive and inflexible labor equation works out. It's big fish, small pond thinking rather than small fish, big pond. (Or actually giant fish, big pond - which is what we are, but will cease to be if we keep shooting ourselves in the foot.)
Do you want to allow affordable and advanced BYD cars into the American market? They weren't produced with unionized labor. Their employees are working their asses off. What do you think that'll do?
What about production companies, some foreign capital financed, that hire American actors and fly them to a cheap Asian or Eastern European country to be filmed with cheap local crew labor? How do we stack up against that? Do we need more unions?
>Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode" (I moved from academia over a decade ago, and I know the difference).
well I have worked all sorts of physically demanding jobs, digging ditches, building offices, tearing down offices...
So yes Software Engineering is easy - except when it's not. When it's easy it is real easy. When it's not it is significantly worse than most of the time at these other jobs. It is hard to explain the stress that a computer can give you when it is refusing for hours to do what you tell it to, but that stress is a lot worse than the stresses of landscaping in my experience.
Some people got a career path like this, and in fact I either personally have or know someone who has experienced all of the things you're listing here as perks. I'd even say you likely get all that if you're in the 95th percentile of seniority and job stability among devs, or if we're talkin' about ten or fifteen years ago. Sounds like you're in one of those categories? Congrats. I'm not doing terribly myself either, albeit not quite that well. This always seems to be the argument. "How very privileged we are! Devs have so much going for us, we ought to be grateful! Clearly there is no reason we should collectively bargain." I dunno. I'm not into doing oppression olympics about my working conditions? There are still things that suck about how labor arrangements are in this profession, and this has become especially apparent during the recent multiple-year enormous layoff cycles in tech, and this is also indicative that we are, as a profession, perhaps losing some of the very scarcity-driven leverage that creates these conditions. Also, this kind of view really seems almost explicitly designed to buck solidarity with people who, in the same career path, don't have as many options as us, possibly because they are more junior or have nontraditional backgrounds or whatever. In fact, working conditions having high variance between devs for various reasons is one of the problems unions try to solve
two things can be true:
- tech work is relatively privileged
- we, as tech workers, are losing out immensely due to a lack of collective bargaining
I look at the recent SAG-AFTRA strike as a reference: these are jobs with similarly privileged work conditions. However, there being a union meant they could inflict significant pain on industry players until their demands around AI training were met.
Meanwhile, we’re all just keeping our heads down hoping the market improves at the same time the biggest players are using our inputs to train even better models.
Just because our work conditions are better than other professions doesn’t negate the notion that we are being actively exploited to our own detriment.
This is true, but it's also true that any 12 year old kid with an ancient laptop on a random island in Indonesia will be proficient enough at writing code 4 years from now to take my job. There's no job security in big tech because it's a global marketplace. And it always will be.
> Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode"
Is it though? People in software seem to be constantly talking about burnout/mental health issues.
Like we need some explanation as to why software has such high pay, flexibility, limited education requirements, and yet not everyone in the world is doing it. High pay is usually a sign the job is compensating for being shitty in other ways.
> High pay is usually a sign the job is compensating for being shitty in other ways.
Or that it requires a set of skills that not everybody has, or that there is a competitive market where employees can select jobs based on pay. Those are two other reasons.
Indeed, I have to question the premise that high pay and shitty jobs go together. I can think of plenty of shitty, low-paid jobs.
I'd say there's a strong inverse correlation. Low-paid jobs are usually terrible in other ways too. Well-paid jobs are usually nice.
High pay means that the person creates a lot of value and that there's low supply relative to demand. High pay is offered because employers want to attract workers. If they're paying well, they're probably going to try other things to attract workers as well, such as offering better working conditions.
Low pay means you don't have to try too hard to get workers. That means you don't have to be nice to them.
It's nice when someone explains capitalism calmly without being overtly pro- or anti-. The world needs more clear explanations of how things work, and fewer opinions.
> Or that it requires a set of skills that not everybody has
Sure, but its skills easy enough that teenagers self-teaching is considered common. Its much easier than most "professional" jobs, like doctor.
I don't think we should assume that teenagers being able to self-teach something makes those skills "easy".
When we hear stories like those the reaction tends to be "damn that must be a really smart kid".
I don't see any reason why equally smart kids couldn't teach themselves medicine, just as many professional sports players, artists, musicians, mathematicians, etc, tend to start playing from a very young age.
Some external differentiators seem to be "access to learning materials" and "regulation of access to a profession". As an example for that second point: there is absolutely a level of professional and personal maturity I expect from a doctor, that I don't expect the tech industry to screen for. Though I'm also not suggesting the current student -> doctor pipeline is ideal either.
It may be cheaper to learn, but the volume of knowledge you need at your fingertips and the ability to synthesize it to make good decisions is not necessarily less for a highly competent 28 year old tech worker who started coding at 12 than it is for a 28 year old doctor who started medical school at 22.
Self-teaching is also possible and a common route for auto mechanics, who make about as much as tech workers. They know how to do things that both doctors and SWEs are willing to pay for. Can your doctor rebuild his own car engine?
When I explain my job to people, I usually compare it to being an auto mechanic, not a doctor. That is what most software engineering boils down to. And in fact, our paths are converging with mechanics.
One thing about software dev is it’s hard to do very well but pretty easy to do good enough. It’s when good enough becomes no longer acceptable all of a sudden that the job gets very hard and people get burned. That’s not always fair though. Another interesting part of software dev is expectations change radically. I’m not in construction but I don’t think a developer can ask a construction team to build a skyscraper in 6 months vs a year or be fired and be taken serious but in software dev that happens all the time.
You're under-estimating how easy it is to do good enough. During the dot com boom many people with academic degrees in various fields tried to move over to software development with very limited success. That's like the top few % of the population to start with. Only some tiny fraction of those were in the good enough to successful range and many were ejected from the market when it crashed to never come back.
Being good at acquiring fancy academic degrees != Being good at programming.
If you ask the top 1% of FAANG engineers, the Jeff Dean's and Ken Thompsons to try to make it as professional ballet dancers, they're probably going to fail pretty hard too.
Granted "academic degrees" and "programming" are probably more similar than "programming" and ballet, but still.
The metaphor "ballet dancer" and "basketball player" or "basketball player" and "gymnast" might be more apt. You can be good at one thing and not good at a related thing, even if both require 'using your brain a lot' or 'using your body a lot'
I was working as a software developer before I got a degree. You're missing my point though.
Academic degrees and programming are a lot more similar than programming and ballet. People who got engineering and science degrees, as a population, are going to be more likely to become software engineers vs. the general population. This seems like a pretty obviously true claim. It's not a claim that people without degrees can't be software engineers. That's a pretty large population and I am a counter-example. My point is even within a population of people who in theory are more likely to become good, and who have had some motivation and invested time, it often does not work.
If anyone could program then we wouldn't be getting paid what we are. The reason why random people aren't all competing for our programming jobs isn't that our jobs are the worst. There are much worse jobs that people are competing over.
EDIT: and by the way, athletes in general do much better than the non-athlete population even in areas very dissimilar to the current sport.
Pay like other things is something you mentally calibrate to. Once you have then it has only marginal impact on your happiness and mental well-being. Let's say your TC is $120k or $80k or even $250k you're going to adjust your lifestyle to this. So sure, you can drive a nicer car and live in a nicer place for $250k but now you also maybe have to make payments on your nicer car and your nicer house and those things may not make you any happier.
Not everyone in the world is doing it - because not everyone can do it and not everyone is motivated to get to the point where they can do it, even if they could.
I live in the US, and according to what I read online, I am severely underpaid. The thing is, I don't really care. I have almost 9 years of experience, and I haven't even broke $100k yet. I work in government (state level), so it's not known for being high paying in the first place. There are other benefits, of course.
Nonetheless, I would obviously take more money, if offered, but I don't feel the need to frantically run around in the rat-race for it. I seriously cannot imagine what more money would do for me. I already feel like I make plenty just to push buttons on a keyboard.
I got my first software job while I was still in high school and when I started my career I mostly worked jobs that I really enjoyed for a lot less than I could potentially make otherwise. I didn't have a family yet, I didn't have a lot of expenses, I didn't care. Later down the road I joined a "real" startup and started getting paid much better (coincidentally or not around the time I had my first child) and since then I've sort of been in the rat race so to speak. Can't complain though but most of my later jobs were not as fun as my earlier ones.
I have a sub-40 week at one of the big tech companies, idk why this article is being so confident that we are all pushing 80 hours?
We are tech workers, we need time to go to the bouldering gym and to take our Patagonia hoodies to see the outdoors.
Both you and this post can be correct. It is the case that being a software dev is a position of relative privilege. It is also the case that many people feel burnt out, the system doesn't support them, and labor solidarity is important. This is a classic trap. Just because your body isn't being abused by the system to the extent that others are doesn't mean that you can't argue and fight against the abuse you are suffering from.
This is true and not at all. Last year, I quit my job, because I was in the process of getting a burn-out. It was primarily because management refused to give me recognition for my efforts. (I dreamed about it last night.) While I was unemployed, I did voluntairy work at a farming coop, physical labour, often simple weeding. Working there for just one morning per week felt more rewarding than working as a SWE. You could always see the results of your work with your own eyes.
I quit a 24-year SWE job after reaching KPI-induced burnout.
Volunteering three hours at the food bank makes me feel better than any day I spent at that job.
> In some (e.g., medical careers), grind is not optional
Not disagreeing with your post in general, but the grind for medical specialists is only until 30 something. Once you are “consultant” (in Australia), it’s basically huge money with a job for life at whatever hours you want to work; almost anywhere in the world.
Don’t get me wrong, the grind until then is extreme, but it’s a weird comparison to make.
Overall, I agree that we are super privileged in the world of software.
You can have the most privileged occupation and bargain to make it better. Its not different from living in the USA, the wealthiest country in the world, and bargaining to make it better.
Generally, you change something you are a part of, not because its the most important thing in the world, but because you have a stake in it and understand it.
If your boss is constantly pressuring you to take on more work, then burnout is not a career choice. Ever have a coworker leave and get all their work dumped on you? Do your deadlines no longer allow time to relax and explore new ideas inbetween them? Managers all read the same magazines/blogs on how to get more out of their employees and it always seems to come down to beating the employees until they die, same as in the slave days. If you're not being pushed to do more, consider yourself lucky and stay there!
I don't think this rings true anymore for a lot of people, even those with "good experience."
It's a lot harder to even get interviews now--I'm one of several people in my social circle that are having difficulty even getting interviews with referrals.
Projecting forward, things looks worse than the present and far worse than the past.
Nothing good last forever. Not saying things won't eventually improve, but hey, maybe they won't?
Still, I think a lot of people treat being a dev as more of an identity than a career. Those with such identities will have a harder time adjusting.
Personally, I like to create and build things. I will try to continue to do so, if not as a dev, then as some other profession.
I've notice that many engineers that have been inside cushy corporations for a while don't realize the bloodbath that is happening outside their corporate walls in the job markets. But your CEO definitely realizes it and they are tightening the screws because they haven't had this much power over employees in a long time. They're coming for you too sooner or later.
Yeah, GP is shortsighted. "No need for unions - things are good right now!"
Okay. Reality check mate. It was like that till before COVID. Don’t be under the wrong assumption that it’s anything like that now, or ever will be. Maybe your experience was different? I can sure as hell relate to this and I’m not even in the valley.
This applies to some people (it certainly applies to me!) but not to everyone. Insofar as any white collar worker can be exploited, which they can, plenty of SWEs are making <$100k, work long hours, have poor healthcare, etc. etc. And even for those who are doing well -- isn't it better to stand alongside those who aren't? Why is the "proper" thing to do just going your own way and being happy that you got yours?
"I moved from academia over a decade ago, and I know the difference"
Pressures are different indeed, but let's not pretend academia of all places is any less "priviledged"
Btw, most professors age well into retirement. Trying to find a software engineer over 55 is looking for a needle in a haystack that definitely will not make it past the next boom/bust cycle.
Agism in this field is endemic, probably the worst of any in knowledge work.
1000% this. My partner is in the medical field, the absurd schedule they put up with and the amount they are required to work when tired is the worst. Some close friends do contracting / construction, it takes a tole on their bodies.
People that take above senior level roles or "FANG" jobs should expect to grind.
Just because doctors have internalized the propaganda that they need to work that hard doesn't make it true or correct.
People who take senior roles are paid for the things they are accountable for. They don't have to do 80 hours in front of a screen, they need to drive outcomes and be accountable.
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I feel like being a dev has taken a toll on my body in the opposite direction ---- "use it or lose it."
Perhaps it's because my brain is full of software issues itself, but I don't have enough energy nor motivation before/after work to do anything else. Luckily, I am somehow healthy-ish in terms of medical metrics, but I know at my current trajectory, I won't be able to sustain it for many more years.
Energy and motivation are irrelevant. Discipline is all that matters. Go out and do a hard workout every day no matter how tired you are or how miserable it makes you. Eventually it will just become a habit.
I think about doing this sometimes, and then I think how ironic it would be if I died next week and my last thought was I wish I'd spent those hours sleeping late, eating, drinking and fucking.
I've worked both senior level and FANG jobs and I did not expect to, nor did I, grind. Some of my colleagues have though out of necessity and I do not want them to be in a position where this is expected of them.
>In many professions, quitting means the end of a career - or at least a serious setback; in tech, it means getting many messages on LinkedIn.
That was the case a few years ago, when interest rates were 0 or below 0 and during the pandemics when IT experienced a boom.
I was layed off a the start of the year and it took two months to get some offers. It was much harder to find employment than 3 years ago. I went through more than 150 applications and tens of interviews.
I recommend this reading about where the valley heading. If you are not squeezed for work, you will be. Developers are becoming more disposable. Maybe you are not feeling but it's happening.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-industry-amazon-microso...
> Or take a gap year to regenerate, or reinvent, yourself.
I'm curious about people who have done this and how they've handled things like insurance, taxes, and getting back into the workforce after such a long gap. It seems like a big risk since there's no guarantee of employment. I'd also imagine having a long break would be looked on unfavorably by interviewers and make it harder to get back in
I can only speak for myself but I took 4 times a year or more off. Three of those times I spent backpacking and traveling in Australia, NZ and South-East Asia, and I spent time doing something else such as fruit-picking and working as a Dive Master and scuba diving for half a year. (Best times really)
Getting back to work was as simple as making a few phone calls essentially and exploring my network. Granted, it was a different time (decades ago) and I didn't look for a mega corp job that requires arduous interview process.
Since then when changing jobs and interviewing I've only ever been asked once about those "gaps" in my resume and I said that I took time off to travel and explore and was greeted with enthusiasm only.
You do realize that this is immensely privileged and something that 99% of working devs can't do right? Especially the bit about making calls and instantly getting a job, that's something even famous engineers can't get too.
If you have worked at a few companies and left on good terms, it shouldn't be that hard to contact them so you can go back. Otherwise, previous co-workers will be able to help out as well.
Many developers have no authority on who is hired at the company they work at or even who allowed to be interviewed for that matter, this is where your privilege comes in.
I took 2 years off where I made 0 income. Insurance was covered by the government and my healthcare was quite good. I didn't pay taxes because I didn't make any income. Getting back into the workforce happened literally within a single day (this was ~4 years ago when the market was different, not sure the same thing would happen now). I had no trouble switching jobs multiple times afterwards, either—recruiters and interviewers have never seemed to care that I took a break.
I was able to take some much needed time off to focus on personal projects and I'm extremely grateful I was able to do it.
My friends who didn't take time off were able to advance more in their careers, but I think it is a fair trade.
It's highly circumstantial depending on the person. I'm a better person for the challenges I'm facing, but I don't recommend it. I'd rather be compensated for the code I write.
I've never taken a gap year, but all I will say is that there is also a risk to remaining in one's comfort.
You mean the risk of not wanting to return to work after such a break?
That is a valid risk, for sure. What I initially meant was that taking a gap year is a risk and not taking one is also a risk.
I see what you mean. Thanks for the valuable insight
I'm not a fan of the original post, but this is absurd and offensive. You're taking the creme-de-la-creme of tech workers and comparing them to medical interns. "Playing life in easy mode"? Would you say that an MD who chooses to specialize in, say, dermatology, and ends up the head of a department, and spends a lot of their 50s golfing, has lived life in easy mode? Probably not, because as you explained, grind is not optional to get to an optimal point in one's career.
Is it privileged to be able to live in a society where you can develop your career and not, like, have to go pick crops for three months? Yeah. Does the geographical freedom of SWEs (in a minority of cases) exceed that of a higher-paid traveling nurse? Sure, but that's a trade-off; the engineer takes less money than the nurse, but gets to travel further.
I'm not asserting that your comment was offensive because I'm whining about global systems of grind and exploitation. It's offensive because you seem to think that no one in the tech industry outside AAA game dev has come up from the mines. I started my career as an unpaid intern, then made $7.50/hr and freelanced on the side. I worked 12-16 hour days coding, and/or 8 hour days while doing 8 hour shifts as a waiter and taxi driver. So now, 30 years later, I can bill $300/hr and work a few hours a day. Is that easy mode?
And if you're referring to the people half my age who are trying to make it in this industry, they have it much harder than I did. They're living after the time when they can specialize and be adopted in as part of the technical debt for clients or companies. They have virtually no chance at job security. They have to constantly scrape and invent in order to stay relevant. So yes, people like me may appear to have easy lives compared with 24 year old medical students, but you seem to be taking for granted the lateral shift in your career - I suppose it's probably easier mucking with python than writing academic papers - but you're taking for granted your status, age, job security, etc. And missing the fact that other people do not get into this industry because it's easy, but rather because they are up for a challenge.
And how many people have said that working in academia is playing life in easy mode? That's the joke of the century.
This is the kicker:
> How many of us have been forced to work on projects that make us sick to our stomachs - surveillance tech, data mining tools, algorithms that reinforce social biases - because we don’t have the power to say no?
Those unprivileged people that you're trying to compare tech workers to, in order to undermine this manifesto, are exactly those who are harmed by dark patterns.
Anyway that's besides the point. Your profile says "Co-founder and CTO" which means you are biased against unions. Your comments cannot be taken at face value, because you are incentivized to come up with any reason to side against this movement.
> How many of us have been forced to work on projects that make us sick to our stomachs - surveillance tech, data mining tools, algorithms that reinforce social biases - because we don’t have the power to say no?
This is also a point that is not only in the range of "lack of perspective" but actively dishonest. Yes, you can say "no," - which is not true for occupations with codified career paths (medicine, academia, law, military) and all jobs in which you literally cannot afford 2 months to search for a job.
I turned down quite a few offers in markets that (according to my beliefs) I feel are harming the world. Yes, it means turning down offers with 2x salary. Just because there is a temptation does not mean we must follow it.
> Your profile says "Co-founder and CTO" which means you are biased against unions
Bolt to assume that. I had a start-up for 2.5 years. Before that (and now), I worked freelance consulting and contract work.
In any case, I am based in Europe and believe in the European approach to social security, healthcare, free education, and minimal wage. I vote for parties that opt for higher taxes to support such.
Incredible that people like you will watch the industry lay off hundreds of thousands of workers then turn around and make this argument. It's like devs are allergic to any semblance of labor solidarity.
> It's like devs are allergic to any semblance of labor solidarity.
No, it's because we know how good we have it. Yes tech layoffs can be brutal but we all signed up for that. I knew even back in college that tech jobs can be flaky and I was likely to be out on my ass a few times in career. But I took the deal anyways because I can make six figures wearing pajamas in my basement.
Would you rather have layoffs at your company or have your company go out of business due to excessive labor costs?
Should poor performers be immune from layoffs? When is a layoff justifiable?
I'm free to leave my job at any time, so why shouldn't my employer be free to leave me?
> Would you rather have layoffs at your company or have your company go out of business due to excessive labor costs?
I invite you to read earnings reports from any of the FAANG companies in the last 5 years. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Most people actually don't work at immensely profitable FAANG companies.
And yet they're so massive that them all doing layoffs at the same time despite that profitability has a huge impact on the labor market of the while industry.
If someone produces less effort than they cost, it's reasonable to fire them even if the organization as a whole is profitable. That's probably not what the FAANG companies did, but layoffs are not unjustifiable for profitable companies.
We're not talking about performance terminations here.
Your employer doesn’t need you to buy food or pay for a roof over their head.
You need your employer to stay fed and housed.
There is a lot more downside for you than your employer, thus a massive power asymmetry. The only way to restore the balance is solidarity between workers and it’s usually a union (or a guild)
I don't need my employer for that either, because they're competing for my labor in a market with many other employers. It would be extremely costly to replace me because of the critical role I have on a highly profitable product. If anything, I'm the one with leverage, which I use every year to request more pay, fancier titles, and larger responsibilities.
Realistically, if I were laid off today I'd likely land a better paying job than this one. I choose to stay because I like my boss, my work, and my coworkers.
If circumstances changed such that it made sense to lay me off then I should be laid off. Why should anyone be obligated to pay my salary if I'm not offering commensurate value?
> It would be extremely costly to replace me because of the critical role I have on a highly profitable product.
> If circumstances changed such that it made sense to lay me off
Companies don't always do things that make sense.
Good for you. You’d still have all that and even more leverage with a union. And so would all your fellow SEs instead of only you.
Get some financial discipline and arrange an emergency fund covering at least 6 months of expenses. It's amazing how much less leverage your employer is able to exert if you can make good on a threat of leaving.
Or you could have leverage from a union and not have to seriously consider quitting every time you need something from your employer.
> It's amazing how much less leverage your employer is able to exert if you can make good on a threat of leaving.
Look how well it worked for the mass layoffs.
Should the most profitable companies on the planet be free to lay off good performers in a country where healthcare is tied to employment?
You can invent strawmen like poor performers and failing companies all day long but the facts differ quite a lot from your perception.
What motivation would a company have to lay off a good performer? Seems counter-productive, but I'm not a CEO
> It's like devs are allergic to any semblance of labor solidarity.
I think that comes from seeing our field filled with people only in it for the money, doing the bare minimum that’ll keep them employed.
Why does that bother you though? I couldn't care less about how others work as long as they're not actively detrimental to everyone else. Hell, the managerial and C-suites are the ones that impact people the most negatively most of the time, yet we're complaining about someone who's got actual bills to pay for doing their job and not killing themselves over it.
The bare minimum is what everyone should be doing, because nobody owes their employers more than that
> Why does that bother you though?
It leads to scrum culture, because you need accountability for the people that aren’t self-motivated enough to proceed with work without extrinsic motivation (their ideal situation is nothing to do but still get paid).
That’s my theory anyway. Previously the assumption seems to have been that the nerd was gonna nerd, and the only thing you sometimes needed to do was reign them in.
> It's like devs are allergic to any semblance of labor solidarity.
It's not just devs, but the crowd in here.
i sympathize but this is a myopic view. zoom out 5, 10, 20 years. It’s pretty clear the parent is correct. Historically anyway.
But what’s happening post covid is a mess and we’ll see how the future looks for us in tech.
Academia is a much easier, low productivity, self-interested career than engineering in my experience. Most academics claim they work hard but have very poor time management and work intensely in short periods whilst taking huge amounts of holiday and flexible time off. Most universities are empty during the summer months. Even at top tier universities in the UK I was shocked how absent people were around anything remotely close to a holiday period.
In the commercial world you have to sing for your supper, as PG put it, and that is much much harder.
> one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode"
you have never done 80 hour weeks in software?
Eh, most of the benefits are offset by the stress of having to care about the needs of corporate america and all the ensuing implications of making a living by destroying society. Just because it's not a physical job doesn't mean this stress won't kill you.
It's also worth noting that developers remain some of the most proportionately under-compensated jobs compared to the revenue we drive and we're all aware of it. It's the shareholders that need to justify their existence.
> But let's not paint ourselves, members of one of the most privileged occupations, as victims of the global system.
Everyone can be victims of the "global system" at the same time, even if not to equal degrees.
I live in Latvia. Teachers here are underpaid. So are firefighters. So are nurses. So are software developers, compared to most other countries, or even with what people could historically afford on a single salary. The economy could be worse, but it also kinda sucks for everyone.
Using housing prices as a quick example:
> U.S. home prices are rising significantly faster than incomes. After accounting for inflation, home prices jumped 118% from 1965 to 2021, while income had only increased by 15%.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_St...
> Between 2010 and the third quarter of 2023, house prices increased by 48% and rents by 22%. When comparing the third quarter of 2023 with 2010, house prices increased more than rents in 18 out of the 27 EU countries.
> Over this period, house prices more than tripled in Estonia (+210%) and more than doubled in Hungary (+185%), Lithuania (+158%), Latvia (+141%), Austria (+123%), Czechia (+122%) and Luxembourg (+107%). Decreases were observed in Greece (-14%, see methodological notes), Italy (-8%) and Cyprus (-2%).
> Rents increased in 26 EU countries with the highest rises in Estonia (+218%), Lithuania (+170%) and Ireland (+100%). The only decrease in rent prices was recorded in Greece (-20%). Latvia's rent increase was more modest than its house price increase at around 50%.
from https://eng.lsm.lv/article/economy/economy/11.01.2024-latvia... (more recent data, but the trend is pretty clear)
> According to Money.com.au, house prices have skyrocketed nationally by 3435 per cent since 1975 compared with just 1183 per cent growth in full-time wages.
from https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/interest-rates/proof...
Seems pretty global, same with the prices of various goods being more or less out of control, education costs, healthcare costs, everything. It doesn't mean that my profession isn't privileged in many ways, I still try to help my friends when I can.
Not all dev jobs are like that. There is only one country called the USA.
And even in the USA they are not. I never work more than 40 hours, have ample time off, and am never under very much stress at work. If things don't get done today, well they will be there tomorrow. Now granted, I don't make the money that I used to make at a 60+ hour a week startup with weekends and all-nighters not uncommon. But it's worth it, and it's still enough to live on comfortably.
Some of you are outing yourselves as not having any real world, let's just call them... issues.
>as victims of the global system.
You know if I were to be REALLY generous and take your statements in good-faith, that still wouldn't change the fact that injustice is injustice. Being murdered is not the same thing as having your wallet stolen, but that doesn't mean you should throw up your hands with a thought-terminating cliche and go "well it could have been worse! Guess I should just let them have it and not do any follow up!"
Really, really confused take to be quite honest.
--redacted--
It's not. OP is living in the past or in a total bubble.
> Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode"
...if you are born in US, maybe, but "somebody else has it worse" is pure whataboutism.
It is possible to simultaneously be a victim of the system and for other people to be worse off victims of the system.
All workers can and should unite to protect themselves from the capitalist class. Tech professionals should not feel guilty merely because they are less oppressed than the other workers.
We're definitely not victims. It's impossible to rationalise what we do.
Use this to your advantage.
Hows that boot taste?
> Don't get me wrong - I am all for criticism of grind and exploitation. But let's not paint ourselves, members of one of the most privileged occupations, as victims of the global system.
Not having it as bad as others is not the same as not being a victim. We really need to drop this attitude because it misaligns our loyalties with those who have no reason to be loyal to us in return. It's a false consciousness.
Wealth and income are widely pushed as "class" distinctors in culture and media for a reason. They blur the lines and mislead us about our place in the system. Yes, many software jobs pay handsome salaries for now. But as soon as they can, companies will drop those salaries and cut those jobs because we're a cost center, even if the "assets" we create pad out the balance sheet more than a cleaner or receptionist could.
Wealth can enable you to become an enterpreneur which in turn can enable you to become part of the billionaire class if you make it through all of the filters against all the odds. But even small business owners are only a few bad months (or in the US maybe even just one bad health event) away from the rest of us plebs, unless they are so tightly integrated (which almost always means family, i.e. something outside their control) that they can get the support to recover.
We're all suffering from grind and exploitation. Some of us suffer more directly but just having lucked into a position so far ahead from the bulldozer chasing us that you can't see it, doesn't mean it won't run you over if you have to stop or fall and can't get up in time. That bulldozer exists by choice. You didn't get a say in it, nor did I, but that doesn't mean its existence is inevitable or unchangeable. Capitalism isn't a law of nature any more than feudalism was. Nor does capitalism have to evolve (and it has evolved, likely even within your lifetime) into something better, especially if those at the receiving end of it are placated by being told that others having it worse.
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The author seems to think that everybody works this way. In reality, many of us work 40-45 hour weeks with no on call and low amounts of meetings. These jobs are in the boring (military, banking, insurance etc) sectors but I make a good, not great, living.
I work at a FANG. Senior SDE. I don't have slack on my phone. I don't read emails (unless someone tells me out of band that one needs a response). Once I close this laptop work is dead to me until the following day.
You pick and choose your own involvement. I'm "passionate" about the job. I consider it a craft and a lifelong pursuit. I'm writing a book on the topic. But the job is just a job. I'm here because they give me money. That's where my obligation ends. I do have to do oncall rotations, and it sucks, but I mark that up to "what the money is for."
My only point being, one of these rants makes it to the front page every few months. "Unionize" gets thrown around. People complain as though it must be done. I've only worked 2 legit 80 weeks in my life. I decided I didn't like it, so I stopped doing it.
That means I cannot compete inside of this place with the people that work non-stop, live on slack, and devote their lives to their job. And that's OK. They can have the Top Tier rating and the salary that comes with it. I prefer to just make my little slice of the world good during the hours that I'm paid to do it. Then I go do something else.
Balance is a choice.
Exactly. Google even explicitly says that T4 is a terminal level, i.e. they're happy to pay you a high salary for 40 hours per week of protobuf copying and the occasional design doc.
> I'm here because they give me money. That's where my obligation ends.
This is reality, but we are expected to serve like dancing monkeys jumping through hoops to make up some cult-like zeal-for-productivity story to get through the interview.
I'm sorry, what?
Most of us would trade our jobs in an instant for a nice fang role where we had 0 oncall. I don't think that option is on the table for everybody.
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He seems to have solved a mindset issue that eludes others like myself.
I reduced to 24hr billable hours a week thinking that it would help with burnout. Instead my ego is constantly deflated given that I am now the least productive developer on the team given all others work 40hrs+ and my meeting/coding ratio has become unbearable. The resulting competition anxiety ensures I think about the project all the time. The resulting lack of energy has affected my other projects/interests.
This is 100% in my head as my supervisor is happy with my output. But I can't escape it. I often lie down, stare at the ceiling for answers, only to find myself in a worse state.
The author is clear that they're talking about "billion dollar tech companies" for an audience of those people called to them.
You're right that these are not the only place that people can write software and that many of us have recognized for a very long while that these are noxious places to write software, or that they were eventually going to become so.
Billion dollar FAANGs and their smaller, cargo culting, shadows represent a certain sector with a certain work atmosphere, much as game development companies and hedge/trading firms do. 15 years ago, during the ascent of Facebook and Google, this atmosphere was different than it is now -- innovative and luxurious and inviting -- and some people still look see them through the lens of the past, but they're much larger machines now, with different priorities and incentive structures, and as the author notes, those are mostly not aligned with sustainable, satisfying, or healthy environments for most of the engineers who've found themselves inside of them.
Like finance, they pay extremely well, and like games, they can make you feel like you're part of something you can brag about at a dinner party, but also like both, they have little concern about chewing you up for as long as you're willing to bear it.
I strongly do not think that things like 80 hour weeks, abuse, uncaring managers, and especially AGILE of all things are super common at FAANG. If you join a startup (in any industry) I think there's an understanding that you will probably work over 40 hours a week and that things will generally be hectic. Many companies will openly advertise this and tell you if you ask.
I really found myself wondering who the audience was for this. The person who works hard, produces quality engineering artifacts, and DOESN'T have options at other companies? I don't think that person exists?
I have friends who are extremely smart where this is not the case. Some of them didn't know other options were available. Some did not have the bandwidth to interview.
> The author is clear that they're talking about "billion dollar tech companies" for an audience of those people called to them.
> We’re in an industry where burnout isn’t just common - it’s expected. If you’re not pulling all-nighters, you’re "not committed." If you’re not answering Slack messages at midnight, you’re "not a team player." This culture is toxic, and it’s only getting worse. The relentless churn of projects, the constant pressure to innovate, and the ever-present threat of obsolescence create a perfect storm of stress.
No, the author is generalizing what work at a billion dollar tech company is like to the whole industry. I've never worked for a company similar to the one described in this post, and I think that the vast majority of people in tech haven't either. Silicon valley is not the world.
Either ways, unionizing sounds like a great idea.
Yeah that was my take away. I don't doubt there are many company cultures like that, and you see many highly influential tech bros advocate for it. But in my ~15 year career, most of my burnout was due to lack of progress and politics, not 80+ hour work weeks.
Now, I didnt make enough to retire in this time, but same as you I do just fine in a very high cost of living state. I've always planned my career to be 30+ years and optimized for that. I have no interest in working at a place where I'll make a million+ a year in exchange for my personal ethics and life. I want to retire and be able to actually enjoy it.
> I want to retire and be able to actually enjoy it.
In hindsight the goal of retirement seems so weird.
Nobody can save their time into an account (your hours of life cannot be transferred). I have many friends that died before 65, or I know retirees with health issues that severely interfere with enjoyment of life.
In theory we can save money by investing for later (money ≠ time). In practice I strongly believe our governments will steal our investments... Demographics suggest that governments will go broke and so governments will take what whatever they can.
I'm in New Zealand and there are clear signals to me that retirement savers will get rug-pulled by our government (changes to age/$ thresholds, but also other various taxation suggestions). A government cannot reduce spending because either (1) voters don't like that or (2) other powerful beneficiaries {businesses, politicians} fight against it.
Background: I chose bootstrapped startup life in my 30s and got a small success by 50 and I'm now possibly retired. I wished I had payed more attention to what retirees actually do because previously I understood little.
The dysfunction at those places is more than enough to cause burnout by itself. Source: I work at one such job now.
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I think unions need to work on their marketing. I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems."
What's the A+ example out there of a unionized engineering team that has been able to find a great work-life balance, great benefits, and a fun product development life-cycle that is profitable or clearly on its way to profitability? Show me this company.
I have family and friends who work for airline unions, parcel unions, teacher unions, etc. Some love it, some hate it. Those who love it had a broken fan in the van all summer with no air conditioning until the union stepped in. How would a union meaningfully improve that situation at a tech office with paid lunches and decent benefits?
Like, the promise of a better tomorrow from unions carries the same tone as a promise to IPO "really soon" from the CEO/CFO tag team at the annual kick-off meeting. What does it look like when rubber meets the road?
The issue is the idea that there’s something that can magically solve all your problems. If you believe in panaceas, everything will disappoint you.
Unions are a tool, and tools have tradeoffs. They will be able to solve some of your problems — most importantly, the power imbalance between employer and employee — and introduce new ones you didn’t have before. The bet is that if we collectively use unions correctly, they will solve more problems than they create; that we will, on balance, be better off.
Great. Show me examples of teams who took that bet and how it paid off.
Let’s take the NYT Tech Guild. They negotiated a new contract following a strike last November. Here are some of the things they won:
> Enhanced job security with ‘just cause’ protections
> Guaranteed wage increases for the first time of up to 8.25% (plus additional base rate discretionary compensation) that prioritize the largest wage increases for the lowest paid members over the life of the contract
> Additional compensation for on-call work
> Important protections that lock in guardrails on additional variable compensation (including stocks and bonuses)
> Improved protections for workers on visas
> Language guaranteeing flexible hybrid work schedules
> Process and transparency protections related to career growth, performance reviews and other workplace issues
https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/11/24319022/nyt-times-tech-...
As a fairly progressive news outlet attracting staff with certain sensibilties in the NYC area and selling views to people who are the same, the NYTimes board of directors has a vested PR interest in tolerating unions with the large amounts money they have to pay for the privilege. I'm not convinced the company is better served by unionized employees over the rest of the tech scene, which has to innovate to stay solvent.
Knowing someone in tech there who refused to join the union, I was told these guys aren't particularly the best or smartest colleagues she's ever worked with to put it mildly.
Sounds plausible, but that hypothesis is ultimately belied by the the NYT's actual stance toward their unions (which is hostile): https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/feb/01/leaked-message...
> The National Labor Relations Board rejected the New York Times’ attempt to stop the election, alleging the bargaining unit was improper. The company had previously declined to voluntarily recognize the union and immediately began holding anti-union captive audience meetings with workers.
> The NewsGuild of New York filed a complaint earlier this month with the NLRB, accusing the Times of violating federal labor law by adding new paid days off to the company holiday calendar for non-union employees only – which was viewed as a tactic to dissuade workers from voting for the union.
> After the complaint was filed, the New York Times made similar changes to its bereavement policy, making it applicable only to non-union workers. The union is collecting signatures as part of a public petition demanding the New York Times stop what it calls union-busting.
> On 5 January, the NLRB filed a complaint against the Times, ruling the company violated federal labor law by telling some employees they could not show support for tech workers seeking to unionize.
It’s funny how you have hard facts backed by citation, and the other poster has nothing but vibes and anecdotes. I don’t know if you convinced him, but you certainly make a compelling case for everyone else reading this exchange.
He forgot the neo when he called the times a liberal institution.
Forgive me if this is an overly-simplistic question – I'm a student, so there is a lot I don't know and this seems to be a complex topic, but I ask this in good faith: if the people that are members of the union are happy with it, what negative outcome is produced so as to make the union a bad solution?
From what I understand, the basic purpose of a union is to give its members more collective negotiating power with the employer. Its purpose isn't to better serve the company, necessarily, but to give the employees a more effective means of having their needs met – if employees feel these needs aren't being met, negotiating and making an agreement collectively could be a more effective route. Its job is to change the power dynamic between employees and companies, in favor of the employees. If this is the case, and the NYTimes tech staff who are union members like the outcome unionizing has had, then how is it a bad solution? What would be a better alternative of meeting the employees' needs?
I recognize my understanding is probably incomplete; I write this comment not to defend this position on unions, but to learn why it may be wrong.
A general problem is it can make the industries less competitive and the companies struggle as work moves elsewhere. See the history of Detroit for example.
A lot depends on the details.
> Knowing someone in tech there who refused to join the union, I was told these guys aren't particularly the best or smartest colleagues she's ever worked with to put it mildly.
Hackernews poster go 5 minutes without insulting your peers challenge: impossible.
I think the rub is that you don’t consider them peers at all?
I made $450k TC in my last job. In Atlanta. I don't think we need unions to be treated well.
Unions will kickstart the offshoring of our career. Just like every other place unions exist without a talent monopoly (manufacturing, automotive, and most recently film crews).
Google is going to hire in developing markets and stop hiring domestically. Everyone else will follow. The talent in India is incredible these days. You can't knock them or call them less talented than US engineers. They're rock solid. And there are lots of other talented worldwide markets for software engineering.
Without antitrust action from the DOJ/FTC, big tech will continue to crush domestic startups too or create a ceiling for how large they can grow in our market.
And if unions lead to offshoring happening, we're fucked.
Both of these things can't be true at once†:
1. Tech workers are currently treated as well as (or better than) we would be without unions.
2. Unions would cause companies to offshore jobs to developing markets with similar talent.
If unions don't increase worker compensation, why would they cause companies to offshore jobs? Conversely, if companies could acquire comparable talent in emerging markets for less money, why aren't they doing that already?
† Or, rather, they could be, but it would mean companies leaving a lot of money on the table out of the goodness of their hearts.
Sure they can. Imagine the unions that make it hard to fire people - either because of individual performance, or because of downsizing.
1. Tech workers are currently treated well - good hours, good salary, great benefits, etc... (until they are fired / position is eliminated).
2. If unions appear which make firing people hard, companies would stop hiring in US, and switch to India or temp contractors.
Brother they’ve been threatening that for decades. If that was possible they would have done it 40 years ago.
Wake up. Engineers in other countries are just as good as we are. The only reason we don't hire remote is that the business functions here keep the same hours.
You throw unions into the mix and suddenly dealing with the time difference becomes the lesser evil.
I hire remote programmers in multiple countries. I absolutely know that they’re as good as we are.
I promise you that capitalists aren’t really concerned with time differences.
2. hasn't happened in Europe, where it's famously hard to fire people. Why would this happen in the US?
I suppose "treated well" is kinda nebulous. Personally, I'd say it encompasses job security, so if unions make it hard to fire people then they are improving treatment of workers.
> tech workers are currently treated well
I’m sorry, but you must not be paying attention to the current climate. To name one example, Facebook just laid off many workers and explicitly labeled them “low performers”.
Tech companies have already been caught colluding to suppress wages. They are sending as many jobs as they can overseas, and bringing in even more h1b workers.
It is clear to anyone that’s paying attention that they are doing their best to damage our negotiating position so that they no longer have to treat us well (read: fairly)
>If unions don't increase worker compensation, why would they cause companies to offshore jobs?
Because unions are a headache for management to deal with and that headache is much worse than compensation, which is a budget-line item, and doesn't personally impact anyone in management.
The AWU, for e.g, has political goals that represent what a small minority of Alphabet employees want but end up being a pain in a for anyone to deal with.
I assure you that management tracks budget-line items very closely, especially when they are the largest one (as is the case at almost all software companies).
> Unions will kickstart the offshoring of our career
People are offshoring right now, and increasingly so. A union is arguably one of the only tools left to prevent offshoring, short of government intervention.
how would that work? Maybe the current force is protected, but if there is no new US hires, then teams will slowly shift due to people retiring or leaving.
"sorry, no more open positions in the US... but don't worry, you are getting some helpers from India!"
That is the kind of thing a good union is supposed to fight against. People go on strike when offshoring happens.
There are simple location-based reasons why jobs wouldn't be offshored- longshoremen, electricians and plumbers, flight attendants (for USA based airlines), and also the NYT tech staff are unlikely to be offshored.
I'm still not sure that unions don't make sense for tech- it seems like the idea that tech workers need protection from their employers is gaining ground.
I also think there are still a lot of reasons why unions don't make sense.
Well clearly you don’t need a tech union.
But with tech unions, situations like the parent's become non-existent because individuals can't negotiate for themselves.
I've been in three different unions in my life. All three exploited me. All three were in the employer's pocket. All three unfairly distributed the work so that the union rep and their friends got the easiest work and the best pay. All three made sure I was paid the minimum.
My computer skills are what finally allowed me to punch my own ticket. I'll be damned if I hand that power back over to someone else.
If they can offshore your job because you joined a union they can do so if you didn't join one too.
It's more likely they'll offshore the union job.
Unions lead to an ossified workforce where nobody does more than what is essential. New employees are jealous of tenured employees with more benefits. Once people get tenure, they'll take advantage of their status. This leads to lower productivity, not higher productivity.
Without a union, you have people fighting to show their seniority and leadership at every level. The top 10% naturally sort themselves out. And the take home typically correlates with that.
Union jobs get easier and cushier with tenure.
Non-union jobs get harder the more you want from the job, but you are in control of your career progression and comp. And the strongest rise to the top.
Switching jobs or unions will fuck with seniority, dues, etc., so it will become a factor in choosing jobs. It will likely lead to many more "lifers" who work at a single job for a long time. This leads to less knowledge and skill mobility, tighter code ownership (less fungible, less exposed to new ideas), and this will certainly lead to ossification of organizations and business functions.
Businesses are probably more afraid of unions than they are high compensation.
> Unions lead to an ossified workforce where nobody does more than what is essential.
> It will likely lead to many more "lifers" who work at a single job for a long time. This leads to less knowledge and skill mobility, tighter code ownership (less fungible, less exposed to new ideas), and this will certainly lead to ossification of organizations and business functions.
Funny, you just described basically every large company I have ever worked at. None of them were really unionized (one did have a union but it was very small).
It’s so wild to hear capitalist talking points come from a worker.
Bro please don't unionize they're going to outsource our jobs bro please
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_St...
pretty much every team in blue collar industries which have been able to negotiate better working conditions, better pay, and more time off.
But tech isn't a blue collar industry, and this is about tech unions.
I work in a data center with electricians, tower climbers, and systems and network engineers. ALL of us are blue collar. Including me, a systems/network engineer. I suggest you investigate this aspect of tech — there’s more to it than VS Code and JavaScript
Data Center and Operations people absolutely are blue collar in attitude and mindset, but you DC folks get to be isolated.
If you're in a working environment that hires SDEs straight out of Tier 1 Universities, start talking about what it's like to grow up poor and you'll see quickly how everyone's eyes glaze over and you get treated like a pariah.
No worries on that front: I grew up dirt poor. Now I’m at a well known HFT firm. I know this quite well. I absolutely don’t belong.
Edit to add: I’m never allowed to forget that I don’t belong.
Had the same experience at an extremely well known hedge fund.
Good luck and keep your head down, but also once you get to a comfortable position, find a good exit.
There are better environments and finance isn't at the top of the pay pyramid anymore.
Not sure why this would get downvoted?
Appreciate the advice! Glad to know my plan is sane :)
I'd point to Kickstarter United - https://kickstarterunited.org
How tech workers at Kickstarter formed one of the only unions in the industry ( 190 points | Oct 7, 2020 | 369 comments ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24711814
Kickstarter Union voted 97.6% to ratify one of the first tech union contracts ( 179 points | June 17, 2022 | 305 comments ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31780972
Kickstarter only voted 97.6% after absolutely bitter internal conflicts and a semi-forced exodus of people who weren't on board with the plan. The in-fighting was extremely bitter, extremely personal, included death-threats and I know several former Kickstarter employees on both sides of that mess who are in therapy over how that all went down.
Were death threats on one side more than the other? If so, which side?
That's not the narrative you should be looking to draw from this.
love those flying goalposts. i guess "tech" is different enough from other kinds of labor that it's special? ok:
IFPTE, UAW, CWA (which just recently welcomed workers in the video game industry: https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/video-game-workers-launc...)
edit: Alphabet Workers Union under CWA, Riot Games under UAW, Tech Workers Coalition
Yeah but the question is "are there any examples where unions obviously helped the workers". You responded "blue collar unions", where there's a pretty common perception that they did help, but when it comes to white collar unions you can only come up with examples that aren't really known for having done anything. UAW isn't even white-collar.
The whole conversation is about the novelty and usefulness of something that doesn't exist in the mainstream. Those who are skeptical can eternally say "show me more examples". Maybe your critique isn't as useful as you think it is.
the "tech industry" is somehow totally isolated and completely different from all other types of labor in the history of the united states? how?
here's an answer i gave to this question downstream: "the Riot Games union is bargaining for better pay and less brutal working hours. at Blizzard they did employee walkouts, leading to better pay and changes in work culture. at Kickstarter they negotiated better remote work policies and reduction of discriminatory actions."
Why is tech not blue collar? Because you use your brain instead of your hands? You are closer to a plumber or an electrician than to Sergey Brin, griping that you should be working 60 hours a week to develop AI to replace you for Alphabet shareholders.
Well yeah, isn’t manual vs mental labor the classic blue collar/white collar distinction?
> You are closer to a plumber or an electrician than to Sergey Brin
I'm also a lot closer to a lawyer or a doctor than I am to a plumber. And very likely on the Sergey Brin side of the distribution.
Doctors have unions [1] ("among actively practicing physicians, approximately 70,000 currently belong to a union, representing 8% of physicians" [2]), lawyers have essentially guilds. If your wealth is closer to Brin’s than the median, than you’re an outlier whom I would not expect to need nor value a union (congrats on your luck). Unions are for the median, not the very wealthy and lucky [3].
The median annual wage for physicians and surgeons in the US was $239,200 in 2023. In May 2023, the median annual wage for lawyers in the U.S. was $145,760, with the lowest 10% earning less than $69,760 and the highest 10% earning more than $239,200. Stats shamelessly stolen from the US BLS website.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/doctors-unionize-as-health...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9616465/
[3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-breakdown-of-who-o...
We don’t have feathers in our caps. Blue, white, red, whatever - we are all resources working for the capitalists, and should try to learn whatever we can from each other.
So, why are there no major tech unions specifically? Tech is a “new” field (relatively speaking), is generally well paid, and comes with relatively better benefits compared to other fields. This is not something inherent to the field: it’s just a supply vs. demand thing combined with easy access to money (low rates, VCs, etc).
Unions will start to become more prominent as shit hits the fan for us tech workers. Because without a unifying threat, there is no realistic way to convince a bunch of people who are living relatively well to join forces - as demonstrated by this thread.
Unfortunately, the existence of a common threat is necessary imo but not sufficient (in the US at least), as we’ve witnessed over the past few years of layoffs and forced RTO.
I agree. Unless you are programming Java.
"Java is a blue collar language." - James Gosling
The following is my personal experience being part of a collective bargaining union (OPSEU local 598), which encompassed a few hundred workers for Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, in Toronto Ontario, from 2007-2017. I worked in IT for the duration of my employment (although not all union members were IT - but a lot were.)
The good:
- An elected collective bargaining team negotiated for us every ~5 years, and came up with a collective bargaining agreement (CBA). This allowed the members to express their desires for what they wanted (although not all requests were brought up in bargaining, and had to be agreed to to be ratified), which were generally listened to
- On-call compensation was set out as part of that agreement, and was the most generous I've experienced in my 25+ year career.
- Members could file grievances with the union regarding work conditions, or unfair treatment of the workers (I don't recall hearing of this ever happening, but there were processes in place for it)
- Health benefits were good, if not the best I've seen
- You could get two pay bumps per year, one that all union members got that was set aside in the CBA, and another moving you up a spot in your pay band (but only if you were not at the top of your salary band)
The bad:
- Union dues, while not huge, were yet another noticeable deduction from each pay
- When at the top of your salary band, you only got the one cost of living adjustment per year. There was no automatic way of moving to the next salary band
- Getting promoted means applying for internally posted positions (which all employees can apply for), and successfully being hired in to that position. This is the only way to move up salary bands, and you could only move up one pay slot in the new band (as they overlapped between bands). This really limited upwards career growth, and meant that leaving the company was the only way to get double-digit pay increases (or move in to management, which was outside the union)
- Our CBA strangely didn't cover / prevent layoffs of staff (although other union CBAs certainly do - so this is just my own experience), so I was one of the 100+ members that were laid off when a new VP decided to outsource a bunch of our roles to Tata Consultancy Services in India. There were provisions in place given my seniority that would have made a more junior union members have to be laid off in place of me (so I could take over their role instead), however I opted to take my severance package as I was ready to move on.
So to summarize - unions are definitely a mixed bag in my experience. I can appreciate the good they can do (and different CBAs will result in wildly different experiences), but from what I've personally seen, they generally function to treat all workers in a similar way: not rewarding the best, and not really punishing the worst.
Are you working 7 days a week in horrific circumstances? Do you have children as your colleagues? No? That’s due to unions and labourers fighting for the rights you currently have.
IMO that's a pretty irrelevant example when it comes to today's tech unions and ignores the thrust of the commenter's question.
Yes, unions were responsible for changing the factory working culture in the past. But I know tons of people that work in tech jobs now that have to be some the cushiest jobs in the history of the planet. Yes, there is stress, not a lot of job security, and the standard corporate BS, but tech employees are generally paid quite well with great perks (obviously, depending on the company). The people who work at these companies aren't accidentally falling into vats at meat processing plants a la The Jungle, so unions need to convince them what the benefit would be to them now.
> Do you have children as your colleagues?
Well...
Unionization, mandatory schooling, and work-life balance are all collective outcomes of industrialization and urbanization. Claiming that one caused the other is silly oversimplification.
I've had plenty of colleagues that act like children.
Heh, it terrifies me at times of how clueless of the past the general population is. We're already at the point in history where people like Bezos and Musk want to return to company cities with their own non-cash payment systems.
The 1800's were horrific. It was not the industrial revolution alone that made things better. People had to fight and die in the labor movement for better outcomes for us now.
Unbelievable that this had to be spelled out. Do people actually think that current working conditions and employee rights were bestowed upon us by benevolent capitalists?
When it comes to tech workers, not by benevolent capitalists, but by greedy capitalists.
Up until say 2022 or so, the vast majority of people who worked in tech companies in the US were compensated extremely well (relatively) without unions, the reason being that (a) modern tech, especially software, can be such a "force multiplier" where a small team of programmers can serve millions of customers and (b) there really is a huge difference in individual programmer capability, and in winner-take-all/most markets, capitalists were willing to pay outsized amounts for those they deemed higher quality workers (meaning able to create higher quality/better/faster etc. products).
We're at an inflection point now both with the general maturity of the Internet, and with AI, that the ability to capture huge parts of the market is less dependent on the skills of individual software engineers/product managers, etc. When you are less able to differentiate the quality of your labor against your peers, that is when unions become more desirable.
We were talking about where worker rights came from in general. And the answer to that is unions.
Only when this thread got sidetracked. The article and comment that started this thread are about tech industry unions. I can fully appreciate the role unions played by improving working conditions in the past and still come to the conclusion that I wouldn't want them for (most) tech industry workers now.
I think we are already past the point where unions would be valuable. Did you miss out on the continuous layoffs and forced RTO?
Not sure why this is downvoted.
A quick read up on the history of the labor movement will show that it started because people didn't want to work 6 days a week, 12 hours a day in factories anymore.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day
International workers day started as a protest to get 8 hour days.
> The bet is that if we collectively use unions correctly,
This sounds awfully similar to when people were holding their iPhones wrong.
Let me put it this way. If a rowing team spends their time infighting rather than coordinating, they’ll find it difficult to make progress even though they can in theory move very fast.
No but you don’t understand, I’m the fastest rower in the group, so I shouldn’t need to work together because that’d just make me slower!!!
> What's the A+ example out there of a unionized engineering team that has been able to find a great work-life balance, great benefits, and a fun product development life-cycle that is profitable or clearly on its way to profitability? Show me this company.
South Korean search giant Naver. Union website here: https://www.naverunion.com/
I'd like to see unions negotiate better equity deals. For pre-IPO companies, it's typical that the equity is worth nothing, and employees can actually lose money on their equity by buying it during early exercise or when they leave. For a typical employee, equity is too risky and too detached from their individual activity to be part of compensation, and it makes more sense to have different incentives. E.g. SAFEs or convertible notes where you can get paid at the next funding round instead of the IPO between 10 years and never. Alternatively, a union would have leverage and scale to arrange tender offers that individuals wouldn't. Also, during an acquisition, the union can negotiate to waive liquidation preference, since an acquirer doesn't want to buy a company where the employees don't get paid and strike on the first day.
this is a great example of the kind of things unions should talk about when doing tech organizing.
too often, unions pitch themselves on fixing problems that are low on the hierarchy of needs in a particular job (e.g., will this job kill/maim you? do you make enough money to feed yourself?) and it just doesn't resonate with the types of problems that tech folks have.
but pre-IPO equity deals are something that all employees hate and are completely powerless to change as individuals.
I'd be particularly interested in cases where unionization led to better products and processes. Like in a world where management just wanted to ship everything half baked, the union gave the workforce the voice required to insist on accurate and up to date documentation, comprehensive testing, proper dependency tracking and security practices, etc.
I feel like almost everyone I talk to in tech says that behind the scenes, their company's development workflow is a nightmare, so this doesn't appear to be a problem that's fixing itself under market pressures.
We don't need software unions. We need to break up big tech.
Software companies should be able to hire and fire. We often need to have 24/7 oncall. Needs are flexible. Startups must be nimble.
It's the tech giants that are ruining it for everyone. They're preventing new centicorns from forming. They're forcing underpriced M&A for successes, moving into markets with infinite money and killing upstarts before they find legs. They own every platform, every discovery mechanism, and they tax more than governments do.
Big tech recently figured out they could pay off everyone and put pricing pressure back on the engineers that built their market position. Previously they were worried engineers could leave and start upstart competitors. That's why they hired everyone and paid top of band salaries. Now that they realize there is no governmental antitrust legislation to fear, they just crush everything.
They're in search of infinite growth, so they move into new markets like Hollywood movies and primary care doctors and undercut everyone. They market themselves for free at the top of their websites and app stores (or print giant ads on their delivery trucks and cardboard packaging). Things that would cost competitors hundreds of millions of dollars to do.
The problem is 100% big tech.
We need to break up big tech.
Por que no los dos??
> Software companies should be able to hire and fire.
Almost every company in every industry makes this dubious claim. Then we rediscover the benefits of team knowledge and stability.
> We often need to have 24/7 oncall
This feels completely orthogonal to the discussion at hand, nobody is claiming that a union will somehow make doing on-call impossible. Many other professions that do have unions, have an on-call analog.
IFPTE, UAW, CWA (which just recently welcomed workers in the video game industry: https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/video-game-workers-launc...)
Forming the union is step one of a long road before you actually reap the benefits. It can take year(s) to negotiate the CBA with your employer. Sounds like fear of layoffs was a huge factor, but the employer must agree to those terms, and that remains to be seen. So for now that's all rhetoric. Show me a team that has gotten to the other side with these terms in a contract.
https://kickstarterunited.org/first-contract/
the Riot Games union is bargaining for better pay and less brutal working hours. at Blizzard they did employee walkouts, leading to better pay and changes in work culture. at Kickstarter they negotiated better remote work policies and reduction of discriminatory actions.
I think a lot of people might consider taking a pay cut in return for an easier tech job. In theory working in an equally profitable company by lowering stress and comp for everyone and hiring more seems possible, but I'm not certain that it'd work out in practice because of increased coordination overhead etc.,.
I did just that about a year ago and regularly see people who work even less than me, i.e. not even 5 chill days a week, but 4 or 3. It works so far.
In Sweden, devs and IT can just join the office worker union...
https://www.unionen.se/in-english/this-is-unionen
It helps because at the end of the day you are just an excel sheet with numbers to your employer.
Or Sveriges Ingenjörer.
The main thing a union does is shift power from the employer to the employee. How that power is used is up to each union, and its members.
It does no such thing. It shifts power from the employer to the union bosses.
The union members (i.e., the employees) give that power to the "union boss." Not all unions work like that (some do not have a traditional union leader), and for those who do, having a powerful union leader can be a good or a bad thing, depending on who gets elected as the union leader by the union members.
One of the problems with real world union examples is all the laws that weakened and destroyed unions over the years. Even if there were few or no examples of thriving unions today because of issues with the legal regime, that does not strictly imply that better conditions are not possible. For example wildcat strikes and sympathy strikes have been illegal since 1947, putting more power in the hands of union management and taking power away from unions. That’s both unfair from a libertarian perspective (if workers want to strike there should not be a law preventing them from doing so) and it undermines the concept of worker power which unions otherwise aim to uphold.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act
So it may be instructive to look at past examples when unions were strong and compare the working conditions of workers in unions and workers not in unions. Or to look at unions in other countries like Germany where they have board seats and better legal accommodation.
> "elect me and I'll solve your problems."
Isn't that a function of living within hierarchies?
Can you describe a system of change where one person is not ultimately responsible for the changes?
Unions exist as a structure of power, but that power still has contend with company power. Good outcomes are proportional to challenging someone else's power, and people use their power to punish challengers and reward loyalists.
That means good outcomes, no matter what the system, are a function of pain tolerance and people's willingness to make sacrifices for the benefit of others. Unions are a higher leverage vehicle for making sacrifices, but if there is no tolerance for pain or sacrifice then your only option is submission and hoping those with more power than you use it responsibly rather than becoming increasingly more despotic.
Seems like a good time to unionize is when you don't need it, while the job is good. Get the union in place and work through issues like on-call, laying out actual articulable and measurable performance targets for review time, work-life balance rules and other "small" things while the job is good. That way when the money grubbing starts, the true horror-show policies are attempted, etc - you have an established union and a better bargaining position. Better than waiting until the job is shit and having to fight an uphill battle all the way.
i've recently been thinking about when in a start-ups lifecycle should employees consider unionizing.
it'd be great if a worker-friendly culture was instilled in the company from its earliest days, but i'm not sure if a) there's an effective minimum size needed to unionize or b) if the existence of a union would kill your ability to fundraise in the future
> I think unions need to work on their marketing. I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems."
That would track if you were asked to elect anyone. You aren't. You're told to get your shit together, talk to your coworkers, and _solve your shit_ together. And when you do that - that's a labor union. Maybe not necessarily in the legal sense, but in a very real, material sense.
A big one would be ensuring adequate staffing on call rotation. If you are never truly off duty, at some point your mind will break.
> I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems."
Damn you have a way different ear for people than I do. Unions actually have an incentive to please their constituents. Politicians generally don't (at least in america).
Unions need to stop marketing themselves as a way to get better work-life balance. The main benefit of unions is that employees are protected from individual abuse, because the entire union can put pressure on management in support of individuals who are being mistreated, underpaid, etc.
Half of those problems disappear in Europe, quality of life and happiness skyrocket. Sure, you won't have some carrot-on-the-stick IPO games but I don't need to, I am not on the verge of burning out, I have plenty of time for my family and kids and also myself. Kids education is free including top notch unis, (almost) so is stellar healthcare, no need to massively save up for that regardless of what can happen.
I had a big paragliding accident last year with both legs broken, tons of treatment, mris, various physiotherapies... still ongoing and cost 0 nothing, in even rural US those costs would be brutal. My (early) retirement is very well taken care of if all works out, we will probably have more money than we could reasonably spend plus some serious assets, all just our work from 0 in past decade and a half, both just employed at companies. Criminality is a topic on its own. I could go on for a looong time.
I couldn't care less about unions, I never felt oppressed or disadvantaged in any way in past 20 years across 3 different countries and many jobs, in contrary.
Good luck putting a price tag on such things, if you don't get it wait till you are older. Thats how advanced modern society should look like IMHO... the stress of being american with family and without massive cash reserves must be quite intense and relentless.
I live in the US and my employer provides excellent healthcare. I broke my collarbone last spring and had surgery to repair it followed by months of physical therapy. Zero dollars out of pocket.
That's the problem though, you're dependent on your company in order to not go bankrupt after your injury. If you get fired, you're screwed, if I get fired here in EU, it's not that big of a deal (plus it's harder to fire me in the first place)
Yep, exactly. Golden handcuffs.
>My (early) retirement is very well taken care [...] I couldn't care less about unions, I never felt oppressed or disadvantaged in any way in past 20 years across 3 different countries and many jobs, in contrary.
Where in Europe? Early retirement is a dream for the vast majority of European SW engineers. So you're in a very privilege position that's very hard to nearly impossible to achieve.
Unions could address on-call rotations, that seems like a low hanging fruit.
> What does it look like when rubber meets the road?
The book The Logic of Collective Action helped me understand.
TLDR: Collective bargaining helps prevent the free rider problem. It's just game theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
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I have so many complaints about unions. Very briefly.
#1 Suboptimal governance. Especially when leadership gets "captured". But that's always true of all human orgs. I have nothing helpful to add here.
#2 Accelerating inequity. Corporate profits up while wages remain stagnant. Just as u/singron commented elsethread. I just don't understand how this isn't the central issue. For every person, union, voter, policy maker. For everyone.
#3 Adversarial relationship (in the USA). Labor and Capital (via their proxy, Management) need to work together. My only notion is to encourage member (employee) owned and managed co-ops. (Which would need access to financial support of come kind, eg "slow capital". Which is antithetical to Wall St, neoliberalism, rent seeking, yadda, yadda.)
That said... I'm very pro-Labor. And unenthusiastically pro-union, out of necessity, until we figure out something better.
Like you suggest, no way simply unionizing magically resolves my complaints. Meta stuff like culture, policy, laws, expectations would have to change, to create the space for "better" unions. Stuff like repeal Taft Hartley Act, institute sectorial bargaining, investment banks structured to support social endeavors (like co-ops), yadda yadda.
And I have no clue where to start.
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Why don't you fill in the gaps for all of us that lack imagination, instead of insult us?
> If you don't see how this can be useful, that's a failure of imagination on your part.
I too can sometimes find it quite frustrating when a thing that seems like a good idea to me is rejected by other people, especially when that rejection seems to come after very little consideration.
But if you want people to adopt a view similar to yours, and they haven't yet, I think this sort of attitude is counterproductive. I think the person you replied to is right about there being a marketing problem here. If there's a genuinely good idea, and its acceptance/adoption is disproportionately low, it must be because people aren't seeing its value. Maybe that's because they haven't been exposed to it, maybe it's because they lack the curiosity or motivation to understand it, maybe it's because they've been misinformed or propagandized against it... either way, if you care about increasing adoption there's really no other choice than to try to actively persuade people.
I have a hard time with this pitch because I've watched people burn out working alongside me, on the same team, for the same boss, on the same problems, for entirely personal reasons. I've also been in shitty situations with shitty bosses that caused me a lot of stress, and it's hard to point to any clear lines that were crossed. I haven't heard any proposed union rule that would protect me in those situations, just promises that if a union existed, things would be better. It needs to be more specific.
We see what unions do for working class people, but our level of compensation, education, and cultural capital gives us everything that a traditional union gives to blue collar workers. Literacy, internet access, and money go a long way. We don't need a union to tell us what our legal rights are or help pay for a lawyer for us. We don't need a union to tell us what workplace conditions are legal or illegal. We don't need a union to tell us when and how it's safe or unsafe, effective or ineffective to report corporate malfeasance. Again, we have literacy, internet access, and money for legal representation.
Maybe a union could benefit me somehow, but I'm going to need much more concrete examples than just hey, your job is unpleasant sometimes, join a union!
The primary power of a union is the capacity to collectively bargain. It doesn't matter if you personally can't think of anything that you'd like to use that power for. If unionization is right for tech, others will. In the abstract debate it will always be abstract answers. Maybe those organizing a concrete workplace would be able to give you concrete answers.
> Maybe those organizing a concrete workplace would be able to give you concrete answers
Maybe that's why I've never seen anyone trying to unionize a workplace I've been in.
The abstract idea of a union has been enough to spark a lot of unionization efforts because workers knew exactly what they wanted to ask for. Safety equipment, overtime pay, health benefits, etc. Things they were already asking for but didn't have the power to demand.
So... we'll see, maybe someday someone will figure out what a union could do for me.
If factory workers could delete the processes and equipment they work on with the press of a button, they would be bought off too
Paying tech workers high wages reflects the need for them to side with capital when it comes to protecting assets
I had an Ask HN last weekend that did not get any responses but I would still love to learn what governance prevents workers from deleting key software products and their backups because I can't believe boards of directors are not responsible to guarantee product continuity to shareholders
What prevents them is sane compartmentalization. Even in accounting it's understood that you cannot defend again things like embezzlement if multiple employees cross different functions conspire, but you can defend against individuals by compartmentalizing their functions making every step further from their function more difficult to execute.
Same with tech. In a mature agency, if random dev has the ability to delete the repo and the back ups, you're doing it wrong. That said, your entire department is a threat you can't avoid. That is what a union brings to the table.
That makes sense. Treasury and Cash Management have been business functions forever.
The novelty of software engineering from an employee risk standpoint from my perspective was its control over product but in an insurance company, funds are the product too.
> what governance prevents workers from deleting key software products and their backups
Separation of duties, principle of least privilege, and zero trust?
Why would any worker have access to delete both the repo and its backups?
Strong worker protections can help in all kinds of situations. Case in point, I have a friend in Switzerland. He burned out and had a panic attack at work. The reasons were plausibly personal, but work stress always takes its toll as well. Switzerland has very strong worker protections and with a doctor’s approval he was able to take 6 paid months off while he recovered from the burnout. That was years ago and he has been back to work productively ever since.
We recognize physical impairment such as a broken leg but seem to have very little sympathy for the mental and emotional wellbeing of others.
These articles about work conditions in tech feel profoundly out of touch with the rest of the world. It's like reading a gazette from Mary Antoinette talking about how tough her life was (pre-revolution..)
The rest of the world outside of tech, looks at tech and sees a bunch of very overpaid developers with quite cushy perks...
Like sure, it would be great to unionise... But if tech workers don't acknowledge their privelege, they shouldn't be shocked when no-one else turnsout to support them.
> But if tech workers don't acknowledge their privelege, they shouldn't be shocked when no-one else turnsout to support them
It's hard not to read your comment as anything but virtue signaling, and doing so in a way that makes everyone worse off.
You seem to think being a part of a union means you think you have a bad job and everyone should pay special attention to you. Forming a union does not mean you are asking for anything, it means you are giving yourself protection to ask for things in the future without being fired. That's perfectly sensible.
Most tech workers I know are well aware they have desirable positions and do not see it as a bad job. Is there something specific you want people to do to acknowledge their privilege? I would guess not, short of "don't ever complain about your job, ever," which is not realistic in any profession
And as a side note, "tech" means a lot of things. There are lots of people in tech making a teachers salary with no benefits. Doesn't mean it's the worst job ever, but it's probably not most people's image of what "tech" is.
> Forming a union does not mean you are asking for anything, it means you are giving yourself protection to ask for things in the future without being fired.
The way I've always done it is that if I want something my employer won't give me, I find someone else who will and go work for them (or start my own company). What's wrong with that model?
You might find yourself in a job market where that isn't possible.
Okay. If I'm in a job market where what I want isn't possible, what does that reality suggest about my demands, the market, and the people who ultimately set the prices in that market (i.e., the public)?
You're either for unions or not, in any job. So we could say the same thing about teachers.
But in reality, the job market is not necessarily a reflection of the market or demands. It can be a delayed reaction to false narratives. It can be meddling from people capitalizing on these narratives. Unions are good tools against this because they can negotiate with their actual value, not the "market"
But unions don't negotiate with their actual value; they negotiate by holding hostage the entire value chain in which their labor is a link. This results in the extraction of value from the public, who ultimately bear all such rents, and especially from displaced would-be employees, who the unions call “scabs” to justify denying them jobs.
Virtue signalling, not at all.
I work as an regular engineer in construction and I have a very cushy job compared to the boots on the ground working in the mud. I am conveying what I and everyone else thinks about tech working conditions.
Also not against unions, I have to work with unions in my day to day.
Yeah, when people choose to write an article about 'how bad they have it', don't expect sympathy from anyone else if you 'don't have it that bad'. Christ, you all get paid 3 x plus the median salary... Go work a job with better conditions that pays less! Or use your incredible market power to move to a place that does have better conditions (which you all have seem to done anyway!)
Unionise for gods sake, but jeez it would help if some of you had to scrape a little in your past prior.
> I am conveying what I and everyone else thinks about tech working conditions
What you think about tech is not reality, but a riff on it. It's a cathartic exercise. The salary is generally higher, but not everyone gets paid very well and they have exactly zero protections. I know people who are working horrific conditions for not much pay. And it's not good if a new grad in debt can be replaced so easily even when they do their job well. So yes, people are going to ask for unions.
Not everyone who is a programmer has never shoveled shit. So when you say things like
> but jeez it would help if some of you had to scrape a little in your past prior
I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. It's clear you just have an image in your head of a programmer informed by nothing but stereotypes in your social circle. Programmers are not people with histories to you, but strawmen who were born into the role and don't have a life before or after. This is not in service of advocating for conditions of workers in your life, but just appearing class conscious when it's anything but. That's the virtue signaling.
> rest of the world outside of tech, looks at tech and sees a bunch of very overpaid developers
They most certainly do, but it says A LOT more about them that they see developers as overpaid rather than themselves as underpaid.
Propaganda from the owners of capital has worked well by ensuring that anyone relying on an income is more likely to look left, right, and strike down than to ever consider looking up.
Most businesses are not very profitable at all. Like 5-10% margin. If you took all their profits and made them wages (ignoring the consequences), thats not a crazy amount of pay increase especially compared to what tech workers make.
No one has the responsibility to prop-up marginal businesses by toiling for them or purchasing their goods/services.
Absolutely requiring the American "minimum" standard of living is propaganda set nearly in stone by The New Deal.
I'm a child of the working class. I don't think it does my parents a disservice in stating that their sacrifice(s) and toil were not compulsory. I appreciate them, but my father would not have required extensive surgery to walk again if we had settled for less years prior.
We see ourselves as underpaid, and tech workers as overpaid. (For right or wrong)
But you're completely right, Capital has done amazing job of pulling the wool over our eyes hasn't it.
in the grand scheme of things, it's true that tech workers have very cushy nice jobs. but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make our jobs better.
tech workers should be at the vanguard and come up with imaginative ways to "disrupt employment" the same way we always talk about disrupting everything else. four day work weeks (or less), full remote, codetermination, equity/profit-sharing, etc.
we should use our privilege to raise the bar and set a precedent for better working conditions that apply upward pressure to make things better for all the less privelged jobs.
The tech industry unfortunately screwed up a basic social contract
It is well-understood in every other industry - if you want to be at a prestigious firm, make top compensation, sit in a nice office, work with top-tier coworkers and enjoy excellent perks, you must hustle hard and be unreasonably competitive every day to continue reaping those benefits.
I'm not even talking about back-breaking work - this is true for law, medicine, financial services, entertainment, sports, academia, and everything else I can think of.
After a decade+ run of cheap money and strong demand for talent, returning to broader reality may feel very unfair for many. But that doesn't make it so
I think what you're saying is coming for tech. It's just that we've been short 100s of thousands of engineers for so many decades. But both the training (education, hack schools etc) side is closing the gap, plus tooling is amplifying existing engineers such that the gap between supply and demand is closing.
There will be a reckoning when supply exceeds demand, and then talent and competition will reign supreme.
That being said there already is about a 10x spread between talent pay in tech (roughly $100k to $1M)
For some reason this sounds AI-written, especially this paragraph:
> Companies love to brag about their innovation, but the real innovation is finding new ways to make us disposable. Permanent employment? That’s for suckers. Why pay benefits and offer job security when they can churn through contractors and freelancers like cheap code? And don’t get me started on those non-compete clauses - designed to keep you locked down and terrified to make a move that might actually be good for your career.
As LLMs get better and better at imitating bad writing it will become impossible to tell the difference
I was scrolling the comments waiting for someone to say this. And it was this same paragraph where the GPT smell got overwhelming. LLMs love punchy but meaningless metaphors (how are contractors and freelancers like cheap code? what is cheap code?) and punchy but generic turns of phrase ("that's for suckers", "let's get real for a minute", "don't get me started").
It reminds me of when Elon Musk used to show off how unfettered Grok was, how free to be edgy. Everything it said sounded like this.
100% had the same reaction and Grok came straight to mind. Either it’s an AI or the writer can’t write. Terrible article.
Interesting topic though - hopefully people responded without reading it. We don’t want more AI trash on HN. A lot of the comments are already clearly AI written / edited.
Class consciousness is firmly in the zeitgeist: witness season 1 of Severance.
There is no going back from this, as once you are disillusioned it is much harder to be re-illusioned. There will be some sort of collective response by white-collar professionals at some point. I think people are ready for change.
Most developers are paid more than 2x the median wage. For HN, that difference is probably 3x-5x or more. If class consciousness is on the rise, HN's readership is in the classes that the lower economic strata are going to be rising up against. If you have any illusions that the proletariat will welcome you with open arms for your claimed solidarity, think again or you might be in for a shock; specifically, a short, sharp shock.
Conversely, software engineers are generating considerably more profit for their employers than they receive in compensation on average. I know it's not the only metric of exploitation, but it's a hard one to ignore.
Disagree. Class consciousness is about realizing that societal classes correspond to their relation to the means of production, not the concrete wage being earned. The majority of developers is part of the proletariat, at least according to Marx.
In an actual class conflict, when a group of working poor people knocks on your door and notices that you are a little too well dressed, a little too well fed, lacking the calluses and fatigue from working two low wage jobs, a little too well spoken and educated, a little too bourgeois, do you think they will be interested in discussing the minutiae of the Marxian definition of the proletariat or weighing the metrics of exploitation before they drag you out into the street?
That is why all vaguely successful revolutions have been based on a Leninist-type vanguard party based on an educated "elite" claiming to lead the masses. For better or worse, their implementation of Marxist ideas was fairly consistent.
how is the proletariat oppressed by an ordinary non-management software developer?
It doesnt matter. What matters is what side you are perceived to be on.
Drives rents up for ordinary people.
I strongly feel that groups within the "classes" often have vast differences that make me question the idea of class consciousness. A well off tech emloyee has interests that align far more with those with wealth than a small business owner who might have interests far more aligned with blue collar workers. And don't even get me started on social differences, like LGBT right etc that divide people.
Social differences shouldn't make you question class consciousness. Quite the opposite is true, to be class conscious means to have recognized what economic class you are in regardless of any other features.
Hidden there is a good point though. Social differences can be leveraged as a means to deter class consciousness. Let's take the idea of the wage gap for example. Now both male and female workers can be underpaid. As a result, everyone is less likely to become class conscious and realize that, if they instead fight over a wage difference within their class.
So I should just look past some people wanting homophobic or sexist or racist in the name of class consciousness? Nah
I watched season 1 of severance. What did I miss? I don't remember any lessons on class consciousness
> Class consciousness is firmly in the zeitgeist
More like people who work in some media companies have certain political beliefs that may or may not be out of touch of broader society. Witness their constant surprise at election results as an example.
I dunno, I live in a nice house in Kansas and work from home for a nice company and have nice benefits. What am I gonna be disillusioned about? My life is literally the best it has ever been.
It’s certainly one thing in the zeitgeist but I still have the sense that culture war stuff has a much firmer grip on a larger number of people and has a lot more power to swing elections.
That includes both its left wing “woke” form and its right wing reactionary form.
Very anecdotal but it also seems that the culture war stuff is stronger among those making less money, which would be the target audience for any class revolt rhetoric. Could be wrong though. Maybe my sample size is just small.
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Have there been successful general-software unions formed before? I see and hear this idea relatively frequently, but never past that.
I sort of feel like most people don't stay at a place long enough to get cohesion or see enough they don't want to stay in the first place, good people chase better job offers (and congratulate themselves for doing it on their own), less good may stick around longer because they can't move but also are more focused to just stay employed.
Software is also a broad industry in terms of the type of deliverable work (e.g. think buy-once software vs. SaaS vs. in-house industrial controls), skillsets, and environment. It's also hard for me to even conceive of what a typical fast-moving startup would look like full union. Lines between ownership and management and labor can get very blurred.
Is the best hope to look at things like the entertainment industry which are also extremely fluid, but have been very successful? Do we need a long-term period of dev salaries coming closer to median pay (which we might be entering now)? Do we need to better address the ageism monster?
The games industry recently made some real headway [1], which I applaud. Maybe focusing on smaller sectors is the right approach.
[1] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/industry-wide-union...
I work in a union shop and I admit that it doesn't seem to have all the problems I have with the big tech. People seem to care and have passion, but don't pretend to work 80 hours a week, some of them at least. Some of them are decades older then me. Nobody is ever fired, but it somehow pays well above the median pay, but not comparable to the big tech.
Where is this myth about 80 hour weeks at big tech coming from? Is it all Amazon folks assuming it's the same everywhere else?
I don't take the 80 hours thingy at face value, I take it as something people bullshit one another about. I would not even buy 16 hours working week at face value. Nobody does that much actual software making day in day out for years.
>Nobody is ever fired, but it somehow pays well above the median pay, but not comparable to the big tech.
So why would good people want to join this union when they could have a better life elsewhere?
You can think of it as buying yourself more free time to do things other that dealing with computers. One of the things in the union contract is literally the ability to buy yourself another month of vacation in addition to those twenty something days you get by default.
It makes even more sense if you take having children into account. I want to play dark souls with my son more than I want to deal with some css, form validation or api integration bullshit. Once he grows up, I will never have this moment back.
I have been part of quite successful unions in Germany and Latin America.
Even participated on a strike once.
The article mentions this union, not sure if it meets your definition of success: https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/our-wins
Elseforum, I've debated this. I consider it to be more of an inside company lobbying group than a union. In particular, they have no ability to collectively bargain for a contract. None of their wins are things that have been able to be put into a contract.
Furthermore, some of the issues they've brought up have been things that are... not contractural and rather political. For example https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/press/ceasefire-demand ... while it is ok for an organization to have opinions, things that are not about the contract that the worker has with the company gets into... well... political issues and that can hinder the ability for the group to get a majority representation and be able to do the things with contracts.
All that union managed to do is get various Google contractors fired for unionizing.
I worked for 8 different companies over my 35 year career. Not once did I feel exploited and wanted a union to come to my rescue. But that is just my experience.
It’s weird that they reference alphabet workers union when specifically that union has done nothing for full time software engineers in its entire time.
Check out their wins: https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/our-wins
Lots of references to contractors wins which I think are more important but the facts make the opposite point then the article is making.
The reason why software engineers won’t unionize in the US is because the US has weakened the power of unions so much.
There are already unions in Europe for Alphabet that have done things - the French union just outright rejected alphabets attempt to do layoffs.
The ideal is to encourage developers to start their own small businesses and support each other by being customers. That, and when you find success/profitability, don't sell to a big tech nightmare or PE—just run the business.
The "machine" is a natural side-effect of mega corporations and creating unions will just encourage more creativity around stealing your soul or getting rid of your entirely.
Correct. Devs need to stop believing that business acumen is some special skill they can't develop. It's not magic. Your CEO isn't a better human than you despite what LinkedIn tells you.
Reminds me of this comment I saw recently
> Are you advocating for everyone to create their own SaaS here or what? End of the day, most engineers need to join employers. We can’t have 10M+ different SaaS out there and each engineer develops their own personal brand of it. That’s not how software scales.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43379353
Create your own SaaS or consult/freelance. Or if it's too stressful or not lucrative enough, start another type of small business. The "big business with lots of employees" thing is a relatively new phenomenon. Most people used to be solo operators or part of a family business.
And if you prefer, employers who need engineers aren't going away. They're being temporarily deluded into thinking that they can get rid of their teams due to the AI hype, but I expect that to change as "vibe coded" software starts to fall apart.
I never worked harder in my life than when I worked for myself.
Certainly, but it's far more rewarding than being grist for the mill. You can spend your entire life doing less-hard work, only to wake up at 80 and have nothing to show for it but a bank account that you can't take with you.
Building your own thing is a rough go (13 years deep myself), but hell if I don't wake up most days with a shit eating grin on my face.
> Certainly, but it's far more rewarding than being grist for the mill.
Depends on your goals and your personality.
When I list the things I want to achieve in my life, working for myself drastically reduces the likelihood of achieving those things - unless my own business makes enough money for me to retire in a few years (extremely unlikely).
> You can spend your entire life doing less-hard work, only to wake up at 80 and have nothing to show for it but a bank account that you can't take with you.
Amusingly enough, I feel it's even more acute when you work for yourself:
"You can spend your entire life working hard for yourself, only to wake up at 80 and have nothing to show for it but a (tiny) bank account that you wouldn't want to take with you."
At least when you work for someone else (at about 40 hours a week), there's room for hobbies.
I recall a friend of mine - a local inventor (he had a PhD and kept building things, trying to make products out of them, etc). In his mid 50's, he had invented a lot, but his only success was that the business didn't go under. He qualified for food stamps, and hadn't taken a vacation in over a decade. He never had time for a meaningful relationship. He cut his losses and took a regular job. He misses doing deep technical work, but he's much happier.
Smart guy. I knew younger people who worked for him - did more fun technical stuff than I've ever done for a job. They took the lesson to heart and got regular jobs eventually, as well.
Out of curiosity, was he doing work on the side to fund his inventions/research?
I see a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck in the "I have to go all in on this thing I'm not certain will work" vs. "I can do freelance/contract gigs on the side to fund my work and still have a decent standard of living until I prove out my idea(s)."
You're right that it comes down to goals and personality, but if you're in a position where you think a union is going to help save you, you may be better off working on your own thing.
I don't know if he had side work when he started, but by the time I knew him, he didn't. He made enough money to stay afloat and have some (cheap, but smart) employees. By that point he had no time for side gigs.
> It’s a meat grinder that chews up developers, sysadmins, and infosec pros
…and designers, and PMs, and sales and marketing and support and…
I know that, charitably, the point is that engineers often have higher leverage than other individual contributors at a tech company.
But the whole point of a union is to join together employees (as opposed to employers) for greater leverage. Don’t make your tent smaller for no reason!
I feel very fortunate to have worked other jobs before my first in tech. My last was hanging drywall and I will never forget how awful it was. I haven’t loved every part of every tech job I’ve worked, but I’ve always chosen to be there.
I think the author is missing perspective on what the alternatives are like, and seems to have a lack of agency when they say things like:
> How many of us have been forced to work on projects that make us sick to our stomachs - surveillance tech, data mining tools, algorithms that reinforce social biases - because we don’t have the power to say no?
There’s incredible mobility within tech - more so than almost any other industry. Vote with your feet! I’ve taken major pay cuts to have more choice over my work, and have never regretted it.
I think it makes sense when you look at it specifically with the "burnout" context in mind. The truth is, burnout can happen to anyone and it is often unclear whether there even is any real recovery.
And it can even happen not just necessarily due to overwork but due to lack of a clear goal, death by a thousand papercuts, complete riddance of passion and interest for certain reasons.
Sure it's nicer to work from your desk than to hang drywall but if you do end up burning out that will affect your brain and possibly permanently alter it. After that, who knows if you could even work in the industry at all anymore?
Personally I believe we way way underestimate it. Longevity is more important than exploiting the passion and overmotivation of potential burnout candidates for short term gains.
I can only speak for myself, but I would absolutely rather work burned out in tech than work in the trades again.
Drywalling was absolutely destroying my body, mind, and will to live.
Mobility is also a factor - I’ve had high stress tech jobs, but always had the option to quit and do something else if I felt close to burnout. That mobility doesn’t exist in many other jobs.
The nature of free market is competition. And the nature of competition is to get more profit out of less people. It means longer hours, more focus, less complaint, less life. You think new technology is gonna save the poor workers coz it boosts productivity? Only temporarily until everyone has it. Then It's the same game all over again, pushing out new features, new compaigns, re-org, transformation around the clock.
Once one player in the market starts to work the longer hours, it's guaranteed to spread to every corner. Coz you need to up the game and catch up with the competition.
Endless grind.
If history shows anything than it is that companies will abuse workers if there is no organization and legislation stopping them.
The fact that some get a good salary but way more get a bad one plus a lot of abuse should be a concern to all of us.
You may be lucky and sitting at a big company with nice stock options, a six figure salary. But: for every one of those there are many barely scraping by just making minimum wage, with no hope in sight
I wish the common consensus would be: yes, we should band together and fight for each other.
I don't want a union... I want state licenses like doctors, nurse, lawyers, engineers, etc.
Have you considered instituting a formal quality system? I'm not even saying that it's an alternative to or incompatible with licensing, but there are off-the-shelf standards for software process and quality you can download and implement today without government action.
A surgeon doesn't get to time-travel and test 1000 different ways to make a cut. You don't get to build 1000 bridges in the same location for load testing. But with software we can have a final deliverable that remains inert if you put quality gates between the development process and deployment. There is a very strong argument that when it is possible to have process and testing to hold the deliverable itself to the standards, that puts more confidence in the deliverable than just practitioner sign-off that it's right.
Yeah, great, give programming a high entry barrier for new people. One of the worst ideas I've heard today.
Why should I as an individual software engineer not support this? We’re already in this profession and pulling the ladder up could help us maintain our salaries and working conditions
Like with "practicing medicine without a license" or "practicing law without a license" ... what would constitute "practicing software development without a license?"
The licenses are enforced by law... and just having a certificate isn't sufficient for them to be useful. You also have to say "you can't do this without a license."
When would it kick in, do you think?
Would you need a JSON loisence? A bash loisence? Is Javascript ok but only in the browser, and only under 500 lines?
At what point does the bobby say Oi! ?
How about direct control of human lives?
Therac-25.
Toyota unintended acceleration.
Tesla full self crashing.
Tesla software locks trapping people in lithium fires.
Cars and medical equipment are already heavily regulated.
We're not talking about regulation, but directly responsible professional software engineer licensing.
The federal government classifies most software people as a computer specialist, not an engineer.
We had it. Nobody cared. https://www.nspe.org/career-growth/pe-magazine/may-2018/ncee...
Part of it was "most software developers don't have enough experience in other engineering disciplines to be able to pass the FE exam"I looked into it after I met the experience requirements. Passed the FE in college.
But there was zero demand for software PE at the time.
I can't imagine anything worse than that.
That sounds awful.
I absolutely support everyone's right and freedom to join a union, so long as it's not mandatory. (The couple of unions I was part of in my life, I didn't have a choice if I joined or not afaik) That freedom of choice is a fundamental good that must be respected.
Without agreeing that unions are the solution, I think I agree that there's certainly some big opportunities to close unfair gaps or disparities between W2 workers and other classes of self employment / businesses (in a very Tech + American centric perspective)
1. Insurances tied to employer, not just health, but also disability and life. IMO this is a major barrier to folks not working for the biggest company they can, it's a subtle form of bias towards direct employment, and by the biggest companies.
2. Retirement and other pretax benefits only (easily) available through w2 employment. IMO the tax benefits and vehicles for accumulating assets should be front loaded and universal... A bit like Canada's TFSA program which gives ~5K a year of tax sheltered investment. It's also a bit weird that certain classes of workers can claim a home office, but a WFH cannot, or can expense their tools, transportation, marketing etc, but W2s cannot... (Try and expense your Linkedin account when you're looking for a new job, that's marketing cost). IMO every employee should be ran as a small corporation that has revenue and expenses, and the IRS has very little say over what was or wasn't necessary for the purpose of maximizing revenue.
Just stop working more than 35-40 hours a week. If you get no bonus because of this action, that's not so bad. If you get let go because of it, the next one could be more tolerant. You are not a slave, so don't act like one.
I’ve only been in tech for 10 years but I’ve worked at companies of various sizes (FAANG, a 50-person startup, and now a mid-sized “unicorn”) and I’ve never had to work crazy hours. Maybe leading up to a launch I’d work past dinner occasionally but mostly my work weeks have been 40-45 hours consistently.
Am I just lucky? I mean obviously I’m lucky relative to the world (tech has been lucrative and interesting during this decade) but are others in tech really working crazy hours all the time?
I have worked with some people who seem to turn any job into a 24/7 thing but they were either workaholics or under-qualified people trying to substitute quantity for quality. And it did not seem to pay off for them.
I’ve always thought that San Francisco was a pretty laid back city. Working until 7 is “late”. My friends in NYC think that’s early.
I will say that I’ve always thought oncall as a concept is odd and somewhat exploitative. Only software engineers and doctors seem to carry pagers. And software engineers (mostly) don’t save lives.
Tech is a big industry. It employs millions in the US. I’ve met people who only work 20-25 hours/week while pulling down $500k/yr+ at a known company that has a very toxic work culture. I’ve met people making under $150k who are working 60-70hr/week regularly at a supposed easy company. All within Silicon Valley.
The reality is that experiences vary widely in the industry even within each company - sometimes even within a team.
Apparently the #1 issue that could motivate unionizing is WFH.
I suggest a one issue union: the WFH union.
I think it would be a massive success.
And even if you want to work onsite- ever notice that the near-universal distaste for open offices? Yet that's a trend in tech that refuses to die? There's an anti-open office layout story on HN every month, or used to be. For all of the power that software engineers think they have as an occupation, why can't they overcome being stuck in a bullpen, sometimes even in a floating desk setup?
Maybe all of the cushy perks are just what management is willing to bestow, and something as simple as getting cubicles or team cubes is beyond the reach for most staff engineers.
Would a labor union be overkill for getting such a concession? Perhaps. But in the absence of any sort of professional representation to push back or push for things, all you can do is blog stories that get upvoted on HN, and not much else.
WFH is a super powerful incentive that collective bargaining could well, bargain for.
I say unionize for WFH. Watch it work
How many tech jobs are 80 hours a week? My work life balance is pretty good at a smaller tech company, so is it the FAANG jobs expecting 80 hour weeks?
I've never heard of hours like that outside of early high-growth startups. Have worked at FAANG and know many people who've worked at many of the FAANG companies.
Seems made up tbh
I’ve worked 80 hours in a week at Microsoft; before a paper deadline. After though, I was able to work less and regain balance. It’s certainly not unheard of before any kind of deadline at many companies.
I think we should normalise talking about average (median) working hours, not the extremes. I probably worked 100+ hours on paper deadlines, but working 60 hours in startups is about my sustainable limit, and when coding it’s more like 45. People lie about their average working hours so much. If you listen carefully, it usually becomes apparent that their claims are physically impossible, eg they mention that they went to the gym each evening when the hours imply they should have been working. Generally, anyone who states above 55 hours should be treated sceptically.
I would still rather be doing tech right now than anything else. Job market is not as good as it used to be, but it is still better than other work.
Honestly, I kind of only just scanned the article because it was clearly written by GPT.
Others also noted this is AI slop.
This was written by a LLM. Probably ChatGPT 4.5.
It’s actually upsetting how lazy this is and it still made front page.
Agree. It seems that despite model improvements our brains can still distinguish many kinds of AI generated text from human writing.
> You know the pitch - beanbags in the office, free kombucha on tap, and "Agile" processes that are supposed to make everything more flexible, more efficient.
Does this still happen? This sounds kind of 2010.
What I find interesting about this page is how poorly written it is. It looks like a chimera of AI writing (bullet points) and someone on too much Adderall (…because that's happened to me). It's too long yet too short at once. I think the author should try reading it out loud to someone else.
What Big Tech companies are demanding 80 hours a week?
Not demanding per se, but when you're stack ranked against people who ARE ...
A lot of these pro-labor-reg people argue (and I agree with them!) that the ROI on additional hours worked past 40 is pretty bad.
If this is the case, then someone working an extra N hours a week won't actually move the needle that much when it comes to performance ranking.
My experience has been that the people who choose to work super long hours do not actually perform much better, if at all, than those who don't.
Caveat is that this could, of course, be selection effects a la Berkson's paradox. Maybe those who work very long hours do so because they must to reach the expected output level for the firm they work at.
I agree with this, but I think we need to keep in mind that oftentimes managers and executives aren't aware of how this works in our domain. When it's time to cut someone short, they have to decide between you and me doing 40 hour weeks vs. some other employees putting in overtime. It's not an easy problem to solve though.
right, but a lot of people at Big Tech are looking for the sweet spot of productivity, and it very well may be 45 hours a week or 48 or something, and to others that is unacceptable.
I don't see very many senior level folks in FAANG who are "5:01" engineers. There is pressure, but you're compensated quite generously for it.
Exactly. As usual, HN commenters are rat-holing on the precise meaning of "demanding 80 hour weeks" and trying to refute it by saying "Well, ackshually, companies don't spell out an explicit requirement for exactly 80 hours, therefore there exists no pressure to work long hours!"
Example given: When one of your co-workers gets visible praise and maybe a small spot bonus for burning the midnight oil, working a heroic 100 hour week, and saving a production outage, this sends a clear message to everyone else: more working hours will be rewarded and normal working hours is just doing the bare minimum. This message is unwritten but clearly sent/received.
When you are stack ranked against your peers in the company, most are working 80 hour weeks and some are working 40 hour weeks, and the 40 hour guys get PIP'ed, this sends a clear, yet unwritten message, too.
There doesn't have to exist a written policy that says "You must work 80 hour weeks" for it to be an unofficial, coerced part of the culture.
It's as if nobody here saw the "15 pieces of flair" scene in Office Space.
These companies attract hyperanxious and/or hypercompetitive types (among many others, e.g. the hyperdeluded "save the world" types, the hypermaterialistic "drive to work in cars worth 6 figures" types, etc). You don't accidentally end up in a big tech job. Most people have to grind leetcode in order to get into these companies -- you know full well what you're getting into. Your offer letter may actually state "people come to this company to do the best work of their lives".
[dead]
> the tech industry loves to sell us on the myth of the "dream job."
Well, my dreams usually don't involve having a job at all...
No time like the present, and I know that the tech labor movement has been going on for a while, but it's a real shame that this idea didn't get more traction a few years ago at the peak of worker power.
LarryDarrell on July 8, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizin...
My worry is that without premature organization, the next recession is going to make the "tech worker shortage" a permanent thing of the past. We'll never have as much negotiating power as we do now.
If say there was a Tech Workers Union/Guild/Association, we might have been able to protect the older workers at IBM, or the outsourced workers at Disney. Maybe there could be a push back against open offices and poorly implemented Agile. As it is, we're just better compensated workers floating from job to better job.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384298
Have been on both sides, running a company, and being an employee. Neither side is happy with current status-quo, but we're at some equilibrium.
How does this sound as new equilibrium: companies pay across board become around ~40%-50% less than it is today. Avg tenure and stability goes up ~2x what is today. Would we as an industry take this up?
The VC funded startup unicorn game is not helping the world. The paragraph on not being able to say no to questionable products is interesting. It's similar in structure at nations under a ruler. That said, we're not starving, so we might as well redirect our resources toward more useful for humans, society (and even the planet).
> demanding 80 hour weeks
IME, most of the people in tech who work extremely long hours have not actually had this "demanded" of them by anyone, and in fact either want to do it or have sort of hallucinated themselves into a corner where they (mostly incorrectly) believe that they will land in hot water if they don't work long hours.
Please can you give us a typical daily schedule of these 80 hour week folks?
Do they have lunch? How long is their commute? I presume they are in the office, otherwise you’d have no way of verifying they work 80 hours. Are they working weekends? What do they do if they need to go to the doctor or dentist? Do they take holidays - how much? Sick days?
Do they take breaks during the day? How much time in the office is actually spent working?
I have never seen anyone consistently work more than 65 hour weeks, and the only person I can verify is me, and long term even that probably wasn’t sustainable.
Simple calculation 80 hours, let’s say spread over 6 days. 13 hour days. Say 30-40 mins for lunch now we are at 14 hour days.
Let’s say they can get up and out and to work and back and to bed within 1.5 hours.
Now you are at 17 hour days. Leaving them 7 hours to sleep, 0 hours to exercise, take any breaks, do any kind of life admin, speak to anyone on the phone, do any kind of social media. And that gives them one day off to do absolutely everything they need to do. Obviously none of them can have children or other dependents. And none can have hobbies, a gym routine, etc.
It just doesn’t add up. There is no world where people actually sustainably work 80 hour weeks where they work for 80 hours.
i've enjoyed the fluidity of startup software work. have a job for a bit, it's exciting, the thing blows up or goes bust. get a new job. hire some other devs. have to fire them because out of cash (sorry, no hard feelings i hope). burning out? quit!
maybe i'm just in a fortunate enough position to be able to take risks, but i have no interest at all in unions, strikes, secret conversations that the article suggests. would be a mild red flag for hiring for me (expressing overt interest in unionizing). it has a hint of difficult to work with, politicising the workplace, power games.
i will say this though: talk about salaries with your colleagues (if you want)! employers have the deck stacked in their favour with this taboo and there is no good reason to uphold it afaiks as an employee. the more you all know the better position you are in. don't need a special club with dues and leaders for that
There should be a union for YC startups, to prevent them from being exploited so badly. By the time the startup meat grinder eventually peters out, the founders own almost nothing of a fairly worthless company and the employees even less. Meanwhile YC pimps the myth of the startup and cashes the winning lottery tickets.
https://youtu.be/DwbzxemJZIc
From the article:
> Push for Ethics: Let’s make sure that any union platform we build isn’t just about wages and hours, but about ethics too. We need to have a say in what we’re building and how it’s used.
This was the most important part of the article for me.
I just passed the CISSP; and while studying for it, I was very impressed with how much emphasis ISC2 put on human safety/welfare, which is something that I feel like our industry is lacking more than ever lately.
From https://www.isc2.org/ethics :
> Code of Ethics Preamble:
> The safety and welfare of society and the common good, duty to our principals, and duty to each other, require that we adhere, and be seen to adhere, to the highest ethical standards of behavior.
This will take a change of attitude. I entered the industry right around the dotcom bust, when people were still making the jump from their 9-to-5 for whatever big or small company to seeking angel investment and starting their own business. My observation early in my career regarding unions and software engineers was "The first step would be for software engineers to stop thinking their biggest impediment to greatness isn't management; it's the underperforming slacker in the next cube over holding all the 10x engineers back."
But I think that change is coming. Enough engineers have gotten burned (or been through the startup washing machine enough times) to suspect that the profession as a whole needs to be able to self-advocate.
I dunno. I've been waiting for that to happen since the 90s, when the D and R halves of the uniparty fully teamed up to make Wall Street and corporate profits their #1 priority and encouraged the exporting or outsourcing of every job possible. We've had 30+ years to do something about it, but we were always too independent and anti-social for that.
Burnout? Yes. Overwork? Maybe. Unionize? Eh…
The post reeks of privilege.
Go work a manual labor job outside in the sun for a few weeks and tell me how bad tech employees have it. Most of non-tech America is not empathetic to our plights. They’ll probably cheer on the offshoring of our jobs.
I am not really decided if i am pro or anti tech unions yet but this argument always comes up and falls flat for me. It just smells like pitting the working classes against each other. Are we more privileged than most? Sure. We are still closer to broke then we are to the 1%.
I might agree from the tech worker’s perspective, except to someone working in fast food flipping burgers, a tech worker making $200k/$400k/$1M+ might as well be in the 1%.
I have both perspectives!
I went from developer to "burger flipper". There is some mythologizing going on, but that is a lack of perspective. The people I work with don't have the time or money to graduate their skills.
Paramount, most of them could easily, easily train into tech roles given the opportunity.
On the other hand, your post "rinks" of a general ignorance of labor history in the US, where unions have (at least, historically) been able to support each other across industries and facilitate class solidarity amongst workers. Perhaps if you showed up to some picket lines in your city and worked to build connections with your fellow workers by providing support in their struggles, you'd find that they're supportive of yours in return.
Thanks for the spell check!
Couldn't agree more. My friend broke his finger and I told him how privileged it is to go to the doctor when there are plenty of people in the world with cancer and other more serious diseases.
Going to the doctor shouldn't be seen as privileged. Especially for a broken finger, which if it sets wrong can really wreck your life.
Admittedly not like cancer. But, a broken finger can be a serious long term injury if not treated correctly.
I think it is possible to acknowledge that privilege, while still highlighting the things that suck for us, and the ways unions can help. I wish the article did this. I firmly believe there is a strong case to be made here. It gets muffled by the narrowness of the author's perspective.
I've worked in a kitchen and a warehouse for a while, I absolutely know how good we've got it. I have friends who tell me about people dying at their workplaces. Pretty much everyone I know who's not a programmer is living paycheck-to-paycheck. I'm still incredibly burnt out, and probably couldn't continue for another 6 months if my life depended on it.
"As long as other jobs suck more, be grateful and don't investigate legal avenues to improve your life"
That came across as a largely angry rant instead of a reasoned appeal. With decades in the tech industry I never experienced the kind of problems described. Mostly it's been a lot of fun.
You can just do things, like quitting and starting your own company instead of trying to convince a hostile company to unionize which is not a cure to any of these malaise style issues
> You know the pitch - beanbags in the office, free kombucha on tap, and "Agile" processes that are supposed to make everything more flexible, more efficient
No offense, but was this written a decade ago? All of that stuff is long, long gone.
> demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion."
Not my experience at all. From startups to big tech/FAANG, silicon valley and otherwise. Never been asked for an 80 hour week, nor seen anyone work one. I can count on one hand the times that a manager has explicitly asked me to work late in the 16 years I've been doing this professionally.
> If you’re not pulling all-nighters, you’re "not committed."
Not reality.
> If you’re not answering Slack messages at midnight, you’re "not a team player."
Not reality.
> This culture is toxic, and it’s only getting worse.
By what measure?
> this industry is not your friend. It’s a machine, and unless we start organizing, it’s going to keep grinding us down. It’s time to talk about unionizing tech jobs.
And yet, I'm still all for this. I just don't appreciate the silly hyperbole about the state of the world.
it’s because they used an LLM to edit the prose. It has all the signature marks.
There might be good content there, but it’s full of AI slop.
More than just editing, I’d say. Large sections are clearly 100% AI.
Maybe this isn’t an article designed for “me”, but there is a sizable workforce of people who aren’t getting paid super high salaries for super high responsibilities.
I’m talking about the hourly tech employee. The customer support call center agent. The HVAC technician. The on-the-go consultant. Yes, it’s not glamorous, but it’s reliable, it not stressful, and it still has good benefits.
I’m salary software engineer lead and I work past five maybe two or three times a year. If I need my boss I have to call him after hours. There’s plenty of dev jobs that aren’t stressful.
" the tech industry loves to sell us on the myth of the "dream job." You know the pitch - beanbags in the office, free kombucha on tap, and "Agile" processes that are supposed to make everything more flexible, more efficient."
Never seen that. I'll also bet vast majority of tech workers have never seen that either.
A lot of this simply reads to me as not accepting the agency (and the discomfort that comes with exercising it) to say simply say no.
Unionizing is always a good idea, but unions can be a complicit joke.
A "no strike" clause is a big red flag that its not gonna do anything .
And organizing is a good way to get fired. Employers don't care - they won't get caught or prosecuted and if fined it will be after the critical organizers are long gone.
It takes some next level leadership to make it work that is mostly missing
Perhaps another reason to unionize is to claim more of the political power being wielded by our industry. Unions can play a role in shifting where lobbying money goes, how industry advises politicians, etc. At least I think that’s how things used to work. Not sure how anything works anymore…
personal theory: burnout is basically when you're expending more energy than than you're able to recover during rest -- over chronic timelines. that is, i think getting physical health right addresses many causes of burnout. getting your device and app use right addresses a set of others. finding ways to connect with your team, users, company mission addresses other potential problems; ie feeling alienated and on a futile or harmful mission is a great way to get burned out.
wrote about some of this here: https://vonnik.substack.com/p/state-changes-work-and-presenc...
How do you then compete with companies from other geographies willing to overwork US companies? Sounds great on the surface, but if you slow down the treadmill too much, you risk falling off completely.
Not burning your employees out is good. Totally unclear that working "80 hour weeks" is any more productive than a standard 40 hour week. Keeping employees around by slowing things down and making things more humane means you can retain employees for longer, build institutional knowledge, build a good culture at the company, etc. You can have a company full of atomized, dehumanized, and miserable workers... or not? Not seems better.
Oh, you miss the point. Nobody wants to overwork. The sweet spot is billing US company for enough hours for them to think you work more than their engineers, undercutting them in the absolute terms and getting more due to purchase power you have in your locale.
I'm generally in favor of unions, but I don't understand the game theory under which an L3 up to L8 (for example) have enough in common that they would be a single bargaining block.
Compensation and authority scale up pretty quickly in large tech companies. Also, much of that compensation is in stock, which makes the tech workers capitalists. I'm skeptical that you're going to encourage unionization by telling people they're evil for owning capital.
So if the goal is collective bargaining power you first have to figure out what mechanisms need to be in place if L3 and L<N> have diverging interests. Then you need to figure out if waging a 19th century holy war against capital is important, in which case you have to make a case for why tech workers should give up the ability to be compensated by shares.
Also if you want people to come together, maybe stop trying to bully them? Some of the comments on this thread are really beyond the pale.
Ran this through few AI checkers and they all flagged this as highly likely written by AI. Surprised to see it passed the sniff test for users on HN enough so to make it to the front page.
Sure AI gen can be hard to detect but for the most common models it’s easy to detect. I would hope HN has a way in the future to filter out clear AI generated blogs. HN has been an oasis to get away from bot spam and AI slop.
+1 for rejecting anything that doesn’t pass a set of AI tests. I’ll take false positives to keep HN alive.
There is nothing wrong with unions, but they are a response to an imbalance in bargaining power. In places with lots of smaller employers, there is much less benefit.
What happens when your employer replaces union workers w/ more pliant immigrants on visas? Or just outsources their work entirely?
Are you going to picket an AWS DC in Ashburn?
You get a nice piece of metal, come close and personal with coppers and live happily in exile in Europe ever after. Either that or you become a homeless drug addict. There are always exciting choices for these exciting times.
This was actually very popular with offshoring and the results spoke for themselves. I made a lot of money cleaning up those dumpster fires and it's hard for me to not encourage more of it.
I've picked up work that way too. There are two problems with it, though.
A) After a company has sunk a bundle into offshoring with nothing to show for it, it has less in its budget for me. They may be desperate at that point, but that doesn't mean their checkbook is bottomless.
B) The dream of cheap/subservient/good skilled labor dies hard in management sometimes, and it can take years before management realizes its mistake. Meanwhile, the company may go out of business before it has a chance to come home and pay me the big bucks to clean up its mess.
My favorite is sitting downstream from those ascended souls. There isn't ever a deadline they don't miss, so business people never bark on my tree.
This seems overly-catastrophizing to me. I don't deny it rings true for many, but I think some of the statements here really depend on your team and company.
Let's make us American workers even less attractive in the most globalized and exportable industry of all by playing Wagner Act games.
We joined the burnout machine under our own free will. What else did we expect? Moloch's not getting any less hungry.
"We aren't like the other big companies," was a line I heard associated with some big tech companies circa 2006. Implication was that they saw the dysfunction at larger firms and chose to build something different.
Fast-forward twenty years, and they're just like them.
I'd argue tech companies today are worse.
Large firms back then were dysfunctional and unproductive, but the amount of stress was minimal compared to tech today.
It was not the burnout machine when all of us joined.
Oh, it definitely was.
We were just younger. Now we have lives and families and sleeping under our desks sounds far less appealing when there's a warm bed with a spouse you love back home...
Yep. It definitely wasn't the case 10 years ago.
It became significantly worse, with way more micromanagement, less productivity and lower quality products.
I joined a hungry machine that was desperate for my labor. I would love to be properly exploited like I used to be. Instead I'm expected to spend all my time faffing about talking about how i might actually do some work in some theoretical world. and that makes me miserable.
> billionaires at the top
Peter Turchin's research indicates this is not a good description of where the lines are. The elites are roughly the top ten percent and represent an important barrier. Billionaires are involved, but elites as a whole are more numerous and closer to the steep, stark social cliff face that defines the abyss.
Why do you need sustainability when you're making 400K a year at $EvilCorp? Just work for 5 years and retire.
This line of argument would've sounded more plausible several fiscal quarters ago.
My company doesn't speculate in stock market gambling so we have literally zero problems
Because you can code, gold should flow copiously into your coffers and the masses should genuflect to our awesomeness.
Or, it can be like everything other job, and not so much.
Ad tech has given developers the illusion they are extremely valuable.
They are, but not that much. Not by a long shot. Google et al massively distorted the software development market by at least 4x, if not more.
What we are seeing now is a massive correction back to some level of sanity for tech worker comp.
> We’re living in a world where billion dollar tech companies expect us to live and breathe code, demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion." And what do we get in return? Burnout, anxiety, and the constant threat of layoffs.
..apart from 6- or 7-figure pay, a chance to hit it real big, and to built things that everybody uses? and this for job positions that 40-years ago commanded an average salary, because the latest React is not rocket science.
Reminds me of "apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
As an outsider, I'm astounded why workers aren't unionizing to a much higher degree. It's been proven to work [1] against the misinformation, discord, and wealth inequality that companies will, inevitably, cause. Despite the small union fee, the individual clearly stands to benefit[1]. Is it because people are cheap? Or not familiar with history? You'd think that tech workers were quite informed.
[1]: https://nordics.info/show/artikel/trade-unions-in-the-nordic...
America != Norway. American labor unions have (had?) a reputation for corruption, dragging companies down with inefficient and parasitic practices and in some cases being controlled by organized crime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Brotherhood_of_T...).
Isn't the question then about the lesser evil? It's wrong to deny unions on the basis that some people are corrupt. Some people in companies are corrupt too and the US lies squarely in the middle of the corruption index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index?w... I don't see why America!=Norway is a relevant argument.
Maybe you will be less astounded if you read more about how large countries in terms of areas, population, ethnicities, immigrants have people with different and sometimes conflicting motivations about work conditions.
Conflicting motivations sounds like a very reasonable thing in large populations, in fact. But I have a hard time believing why workers wouldn't unanimously want better pay, better conditions, and more power. I would be curious to see any counter examples!
A bit late to talk about organizing a union. Offshoring and now AI are here.
Most every profession should be unionized including software devs. Not including cops.
America need more unions period.
As a European I can only read that and say “What? You don’t get that in the US?”
There's a bit of strawman going on where for example when author says "Not taking 12am slacks makes you not a team player". Never in my life have I heard that one.
Also, anecdotal perspective: I've been private company and academia for my whole life, and I've been with good and bad companies over time. If I had a union earlier in life, I think I would have benefited a lot. I don't think a union could make my current situation any better though. (Again, anecdotal)
Elon will do everything to stop this. It’s a threat to his very existence
How do I help
Why does this AI-generated article have 400 upvotes? The conversation here is valuable, but surely we could find a human article to have it under instead?
400 AI upvotes?
> The tech industry loves to hype itself as a meritocracy, where the best and the brightest rise to the top. But in reality, it’s a meat market. As soon as you’re not "on the cutting edge," you’re out.
I’m not really understanding the distinction.
"I want to make 4-6x the average american salary without taking on any risk, but don't tell me to work hard"
I feel like these calls to unionize aren't trying to improve working conditions for tech workers, they're just trying to find ways to politically capture tech companies
That's why, you know, most of the people who call to unionize are left wing progressives who don't work in tech (and a large number in the bay area resent the shit out of tech)
Frankly given their attitudes towards meritocracy, "social justice", etc, I don't really trust these groups to actually negotiate a better deal for me. I'd expect them to just use the leverage I give them to screw me over. Go on Alphabet Workers Union's website and this is the exact shit you'll see
They probably target tech specifically because they think we aren't "class conscious" enough to understand our own situation. That's why they don't go and bother the finance industry, those guys know where they're sitting economically
Union now. Union tomorrow. Union Forever.
My company firewall blocked this for reason ()
Uh, huh...
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