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I think our union needs to impose a strict and exhaustive test of competency, and no one should be legally allowed to accept money for programming a computer unless they pass it.
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Feb 20, 2018 00:49
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I'm aware that unions do some good and that there is some ~~~PRIVILEGE~~~ associated with being a well to do person, but the only way you can have a pearly and optimistic view of unions is if you've never actually been in one or worked in a predominately unionized company before. The types of bullshit games that get in the way of actual work are enough to drive anyone insane except for the guy refusing to close the door because door closing wasn't on his job description.
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Feb 20, 2018 00:51
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Fellatio del Toro posted:Love that the nightmare union scenario is having a sysadmin reboot a server instead of a developer If I made an argument about the nightmare scenario being piles of dead bodies, will you be happier?
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Feb 20, 2018 00:51
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fantastic in plastic posted:I think our union needs to impose a strict and exhaustive test of competency, and no one should be legally allowed to accept money for programming a computer unless they pass it. I'm in if I never have to look at CtCI again
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Feb 20, 2018 00:52
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fantastic in plastic posted:I think our union needs to impose a strict and exhaustive test of competency, and no one should be legally allowed to accept money for programming a computer unless they pass it. gently caress yeah, get over the entrance exam, get seniority, then coast until your pension fund collapses from mismanagement. You could even race the pension against your company and see which one breaks first!
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Feb 20, 2018 00:52
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Actually now that I think about it maybe we should union. I'll just make sure that my job description specifically does not include the terms HTML, CSS, or XML in it anywhere and refuse to touch any front end stuff from here on out.
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Feb 20, 2018 00:56
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See, you're coming around!
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Feb 20, 2018 01:09
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baquerd posted:gently caress yeah, get over the entrance exam, get seniority, then coast until your pension fund collapses from mismanagement. You could even race the pension against your company and see which one breaks first! What magical workplace doesnt have people coasting on the skills that they were hired on? Thats a big company thing, not a union thing.
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Feb 20, 2018 01:14
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baquerd posted:Software engineers having a union would at least be a very clear signal to anyone decent to stay the gently caress away from that company. Engineers are only being exploited by lovely companies, the companies you want to work for are showering their workers with money and benefits. Nah gently caress you, back up and defend this poo poo. If the "good" companies are so thrilled to be showering their workers with money and benefits why the gently caress did a cabal of billionaires bother to collude and depress their wages? That was not brought up as a hypothetical, that Literally Happened in the last decade in our industry.
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Feb 20, 2018 01:17
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JawnV6 posted:Nah gently caress you, back up and defend this poo poo. If the "good" companies are so thrilled to be showering their workers with money and benefits why the gently caress did a cabal of billionaires bother to collude and depress their wages? Because they can get bigger yachts that way. I only claim that unionization is not going to help the problem because when the incentives to work hard to get ahead go away and are replaced with rules lawyering and seniority bullshit, overall productivity hits the shitter and there go the wages. Edit: and my original claim that only lovely companies are exploiting their engineers stands. Giving someone 300k total comp instead of 350k is not exploitation. baquerd fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Feb 20, 2018 |
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Feb 20, 2018 01:21
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baquerd posted:Because they can get bigger yachts that way. Who gives a gently caress? I'd gladly contribute to a few rich white men losing some money by slacking at work.
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Feb 20, 2018 01:26
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Blinkz0rz posted:I'd gladly contribute to a few rich white men losing some money by slacking at work. Who wouldn't? But in the meantime there is still capitalism.
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Feb 20, 2018 01:29
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I'd be more worried about the effects it would have on the structure of our profession rather than productivity or wages. We'd almost certainly become more professionalized, like "real" engineers or doctors or lawyers. Credentials might be established, we might start to be held liable for loving up in a way that costs the business revenue, standards would be enforced, and so on. It's not like it would be entirely upside.
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Feb 20, 2018 01:36
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i was in a technical union for almost a decade (IATSE). none of the union horror stories ever came up and the worst thing about the union was our lovely dental plan. a+++++ would pay dues again
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Feb 20, 2018 01:43
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fantastic in plastic posted:I'd be more worried about the effects it would have on the structure of our profession rather than productivity or wages. We'd almost certainly become more professionalized, like "real" engineers or doctors or lawyers. Credentials might be established, we might start to be held liable for loving up in a way that costs the business revenue, standards would be enforced, and so on. It's not like it would be entirely upside. Good, we should be held to higher standards.
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Feb 20, 2018 01:53
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Maybe my parents will actually respect my choice in career if that happens.
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Feb 20, 2018 01:57
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the talent deficit posted:i was in a technical union for almost a decade (IATSE). none of the union horror stories ever came up and the worst thing about the union was our lovely dental plan. a+++++ would pay dues again 
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Feb 20, 2018 01:57
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or anyone who has ever tried to push a reform slate forward, but those people are more pro-union than the union staff
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Feb 20, 2018 01:58
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baquerd posted:Because they can get bigger yachts that way. workers organizing together: bad Also, increased productivity doesn't mean increased wages. Productivity increases are decoupled from wage increases in the United States. Decent compensation compared to the median for developers has a lot more to do with low supply of skilled labor rather than their productivity. Even then, tech companies are some of the most profitable companies per dollar because they don't pay workers in accordance with their productivity. Pay will decrease if the industry is able to massively increase the pool of capable developers. baquerd posted:So all you union lovers, why don't you go ahead and found one? See how that goes? If you can organize enough people you can probably succeed, all you have to do is convince people to risk their cushy jobs in exchange for likely industry infamy, paying union dues, and nebulous promises about how it will actually be good for them? comedyblissoption fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Feb 20, 2018 |
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Feb 20, 2018 02:05
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I think it's important to understand that Unions are run by people, and whenever you have people running things, they can get really bad. A comparable example might be Homeowners associations. Everyone has heard a horror story where a few retired busybodies played king of the neighborhood. But there's also a lot of HOAs where things are really relaxed and people only get involved when someone decides to let their hoard house leak out into the front yard.
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Feb 20, 2018 02:05
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comedyblissoption posted:worker co-ops are a better idea I think the same suggestion applies, why don't you go make this happen?
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Feb 20, 2018 02:38
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Be the change you want to see
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Feb 20, 2018 02:46
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comedyblissoption posted:worker co-ops are a better idea
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Feb 20, 2018 02:49
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the talent deficit posted:i was in a technical union for almost a decade (IATSE). none of the union horror stories ever came up and the worst thing about the union was our lovely dental plan. a+++++ would pay dues again This IATSE? https://www.unionfacts.com/local/employees/172/IATSE/0/ Compared to good companies, they are paying pittances. I also don't know how you can claim it is a technical union unless you mean "technically" a union here in the "Working in (software) Development" thread.
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Feb 20, 2018 02:57
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KoRMaK posted:Elaborate. Assume I know as much as an 11 year old please. In a worker co-op, workers democratically own the business and make these decisions instead. Workers are collectively their own boss. This can take different forms. Workers can manage the business themselves. Alternatively, workers can hire their own managers instead of the other way around. If you want an elaboration of this idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDiDt74Fyss
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Feb 20, 2018 02:58
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I've been looking for a new job recently (my current one is a disaster of underpay, overwork, and abuse by management), and I ran across an application that not only asks for a comprehensive work history but wants exact dollar values of all previous salaries, wages, and commissions. You couldn't apply without filling it all out. This is a billion dollar company.  Is that normal? I have never seen something like that before.
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Feb 20, 2018 03:01
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Taffer posted:I've been looking for a new job recently (my current one is a disaster of underpay, overwork, and abuse by management), and I ran across an application that not only asks for a comprehensive work history but wants exact dollar values of all previous salaries, wages, and commissions. You couldn't apply without filling it all out. This is a billion dollar company. It's common, but also super scummy behavior. If you're in Massachusetts, that's soon to be on-the-books illegal (and de facto illegal right now).
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Feb 20, 2018 03:01
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Most of the union talk that's gotten some support in tech is not on the development side but on the sysadmin / operations and support side which is a lot more like a blue collar transactional job. There's a lot more aging, lower-skill folks in operations than there are as developers proportionally (degrees are far, far more common for developers than for sysadmins). This started a bit more around the early 2000s when people were getting jobs outsourced to India at a higher rate and a lot of people had to start training their replacements. I've seen a heck of a lot of serious dead weight in ops compared to development and given that larger businesses as a rule have systems operating in a manner that resembles something between an Escher drawing and a garbage dump I can't really blame them for trying to lower costs for something many people have tried to make sane. Most organizations don't hire developers and the best they can recruit to work on fixing their ticketing and asset management systems, they have them work on revenue centers. lovely jobs in tech begin to happen when you need to throw more bodies at your problems, not smarter bodies. Because it means you've stopped caring about fixing your root cause problems such as lovely, outdated software ecosystem from exploitative do-nothing vendors or a horribly expensive datacenter that's spent more time down than a pornstar. Because most non-tech places will not or cannot spend enough money to hire at a decent level of competence in their supply chain or labor that can fix these things, they wind up spending even more. This is similar to how poor people can wind up spending much more money than wealthier individuals on certain goods and their TCO winds up higher for worse quality (crappy foods leading to worse health leading to depressed wages over a lifetime and increased healthcare costs in a vicious cycle of poverty crossing generations). So really, lovely jobs will continue to exist in tech as long as businesses don't have the money and/or balls to invest in tech workers (and accompanying management) like it actually matters to the company instead of treating it in the same tax section as cleaning staff or groundskeepers. If a place's staff unionizes, a company will just wind up replacing everyone with Capgemini or Tata or whoever else is going to bid lower or has had dinner with the CIO in Vegas at a random conference. This isn't to say that I dislike unions - far from it. I'm just saying the reality of modern business and IT in general doesn't make unions really possible in the US given the market drivers I've seen for decades now. Maybe it'd make more sense in Europe to ask for wages vaguely resembling US workers. It's pretty shocking to me how poorly engineers are paid in most of the EU as an American when European software companies seem to make decent money. When EU engineer wages are oftentimes lower than what I see in complete shithole tech job markets in the US, we need to better understand what's going on in the EU that keeps their wages so low before we can understand how unions in tech would work out in the US.
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Feb 20, 2018 03:03
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comedyblissoption posted:Traditionally, a tiny group of people owns a business and undemocratically makes all the important decisions for everyone else of what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, who produces, and what to do with what is produced. Sounds like Holacracy, which fails horribly at scale: http://nslsfacts.org/2017/09/26/lost-utopia-why-did-holacracy-fail/
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Feb 20, 2018 03:04
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baquerd posted:Sounds like Holacracy, which fails horribly at scale: http://nslsfacts.org/2017/09/26/lost-utopia-why-did-holacracy-fail/ the world's largest worker-coop has scaled to 74k employees and has been around for over 60 years
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Feb 20, 2018 03:17
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There's a big reason why worker co-ops are rare: how do you account for the risk during their creation? Founders of businesses take on an enormous amount of risk, both with their unstable employment (opportunity cost) and their material investment. Additionally, how does one get early loans or investment without offering some stake in the business? It's easy to come along after a business is running smooth and start demanding ownership, but that ignores everything that made it successful enough to entertain such folly.
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Feb 20, 2018 03:18
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comedyblissoption posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondrag%C3%B3n_Cooperative_Corporation That company does almost entirely labor and other physical goods and services. Not software.
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Feb 20, 2018 03:21
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B-Nasty posted:There's a big reason why worker co-ops are rare: how do you account for the risk during their creation? Founders of businesses take on an enormous amount of risk, both with their unstable employment (opportunity cost) and their material investment. Additionally, how does one get early loans or investment without offering some stake in the business? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87395oUPDR0 baquerd posted:That company does almost entirely labor and other physical goods and services. Not software. Note that I'm not telling you to go out and start a worker coop right now or that anyone in this thread should. I am just informing people of pro-worker alternatives to unions.
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Feb 20, 2018 03:35
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baquerd posted:I only claim that unionization is not going to help the problem because when the incentives to work hard to get ahead go away and are replaced with rules lawyering and seniority bullshit, overall productivity hits the shitter and there go the wages. baquerd posted:Edit: and my original claim that only lovely companies are exploiting their engineers stands. Giving someone 300k total comp instead of 350k is not exploitation.
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Feb 20, 2018 03:49
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baquerd posted:Because they can get bigger yachts that way. "Seniority bullshit" exists because in a system where pay increases go to the hardest-working, the guy who was the boss's old drinking buddy always seems to end up being the hardest worker, at least according to the boss. "Rules lawyering" happens because the boss thinks he should be able to dodge his contractual obligations whenever it's convenient, even though he would most definitely disapprove if you tried to dodge your obligations to him! Most of the things typically associated with unions are that way for a reason. They may be inconvenient, yes, but worshipping corporate convenience to the exclusion of all else is a big part of how we ended with companies just openly ignoring any law they feel to be inconvenient. baquerd posted:Sounds like Holacracy, which fails horribly at scale: http://nslsfacts.org/2017/09/26/lost-utopia-why-did-holacracy-fail/ I'm not sure why you'd say that, since they're not even remotely similar!
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Feb 20, 2018 04:06
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Holacracy seems like an attempt to give people a faux democracy in the hopes of generating more profit for the actual owners of the business.
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Feb 20, 2018 04:14
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comedyblissoption posted:Tech worker coops exist. Any examples an average person is vaguely likely to have heard of? I admit I could be totally wrong, but why do you think that given the vast array of smart and motivated individuals across the industry, these are virtually unheard of? How do you explain that worker coops and unions comprise an overwhelming minority of the workplace? JawnV6 posted:Yes, yes, it's only through these "unions" that incentives to work hard and get ahead go away, capitalism is also a magical talisman to ward off seniority bullshit from having any sway whatsoever. Watching all your patents get sucked up and never executed, watching a chummy middle manager abscond with bonuses for wringing his workers talent dry, none of these suppress incentive structures. That sucks too, and unions may be a good alternative in those kinds of workplaces (like I said - one hallmark of a lovely tech company/management would be that unions exist).
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Feb 20, 2018 04:28
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baquerd posted:Any examples an average person is vaguely likely to have heard of? I admit I could be totally wrong, but why do you think that given the vast array of smart and motivated individuals across the industry, these are virtually unheard of? How do you explain that worker coops and unions comprise an overwhelming minority of the workplace? comedyblissoption fucked around with this message at 04:38 on Feb 20, 2018 |
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Feb 20, 2018 04:36
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comedyblissoption posted:You are absolutely right that unions and other pro-worker organizations are dying in the United States. The explanation is that the business community in the United States has successfully convinced workers that organizing is not in their interest and has many tools to kill worker organization. You might also notice such facts like the business community in the United States successfully convincing half of Americans that global warming is a hoax or not caused by man. It's not even possible that the answer is they are not competitive? It has to be a conspiracy of evil bads? How are you so sure you aren't the one with the silly idea?
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Feb 20, 2018 04:39
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If your definition of competitive is to pay workers as little as you can get away with, then yeah pro-workers organizations are going to be uncompetitive. Other countries do have a stronger union sector than the US that is able to compete with US companies.
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Feb 20, 2018 04:43
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