As a proud dues paying member of the Newspaper Guild I have learned that one of the best ways to convince people to join a union is bad management.
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I would disagree about motivation. At least in my experience, unions are ideal for jobs where there are well described job responsibilities, and (at least in my experience) aren’t particularly well suited for the rather more dynamic nature of many coding jobs (which often involve a ton of responsibilities beyond well-defined coding).
Also, the reality is that most coders have a lot more opportunity to switch jobs than most other professions, which in most cases limits the ability of employers to abuse their employees without losing them.
That isn’t to say that unionization isn’t the proper answer to many forms of abuse by employers, only to say that many coders reluctance to unionize may have more to do with their work situation than their belief in being “better” than the union workers.
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I think you’re off on this one. In my industry, workers may have several employers a year and will often do very different work from one employer to another. Being unionized means we have to organize multiple shops, not just one. It has taken us more than a hundred years, but it continues to this day. We receive a uniform (but good) rate of pay across multiple employers and we are agile with the expectation that projects do get wrapped up and we will be moving on.
This cross-employer organisation has allowed us to port health benefits and pensions between shops, and gives us some stability to take care of ourselves and families while looking for new work.
It’s a highly effective system and has ensured that the best workers can afford to remain within the industry without being abused.
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I’m going by 20 years observing and talking with tech people about this in person, in forums, and in the press. There are other delusions at work amongst coders, but they eventually respond to any suggestions about organising that they’re educated white-collar professionals and are therefore above the need to join a union. I don’t place the blame entirely on the coders for holding this view, since it’s one aspect of the anti-union propaganda that’s been spewing out non-stop since Reagan.
So is the idea that unions are all about making sure a worker does his job and no-one else’s (and therefore no-one will ever take away your job). In reality, unions don’t necessarily have to focus on the tasks and responsibilities of a trade; often they’re just needed to protect against economic exploitation, which happens a lot in tech even if it’s covered up by free meals and the ability to bring your dog to work. If an actual industry-wide coders’ union ever came to be, what would quickly follow would be the exposure of consistent patterns of exploitation and horrible management in tech demonstrating that shops like this are more rule than exception.
And yet they generally stay put and sometimes take pride in being ironman brogrammers who can suck up the long hours and abuse that are all too often hallmarks of tech shops. Joining an industry-wide union not only wouldn’t prevent the coders from switching jobs in a seller’s labour market, it would make it much easier to switch jobs to an equally good or better employer.
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It would also be interesting to see union action on walled garden software, like the Facebook situation. Open standards and communication protocols foster growth of an ecosystem of interoperable, competing applications/client software, and thus better options for end-users AND more work (that is less alienating, in the Marxist sense) for everyone.
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Well the experienced software engineers got pushed out of writing code and into designing and managing teams of “code monkeys.” Some of the mightmare is pure Peter Principle (the small part of it that isn’t asshole VC principle)
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i like to include a three letter code of the tables joined for the report, the first and last of who i pulled the report for, then YYYYMMDD…
Why yes, I have violated Windows file path length limits on our network drives and lost access to files…(just rename some of the nested folders along the path, you’ll get 'em back…)
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Very good points. My experience with unions is based on two larger shops (one government), which have unions for very good reasons, but have a work-place that is rather more inflexible than I am personally comfortable with. As you point out, apparently this does not have to be the case.
Which I fully agree with. Unions are very important for protection of workers who don’t have the economic opportunities to allow them to protect themselves.
Okay, I have worked in quite a number of shops, from very big to very small, and I have to admit, I’ve yet to work in a job where I felt exploited.
Absolutely exploitation does occur - God help the poor saps who work in the games industry, and I’ve turned down a few jobs that came from employers with toxic work cultures, but “more rule than exception”? That doesn’t tally with my personal experience at perhaps a dozen plus employers (in my consulting days, I hopped around a lot by necessity).
The idea of regretting our job choices came up recently among my peers (mid-50’s) from university recently, and as it turns out, we’re still waiting for the time when we regret working in tech. Now, perhaps this is also geographical - I work in Toronto, which has a lot of opportunities.
Again, personal experience, but I’d put it down not to “I’m so tough”, but a strong identification with the task/project at hand. In any project that I’ve worked on, I’ve had a strong personal interest in seeing it to a successful completion. And yes, that has entailed long hours on occasion.
But I will say that I’d leave any job where I didn’t have that identification (and that was contracts or full-time). Life is way too short to spend 8-10 hours doing something that one doesn’t have a passion for. And if you have a passion for something, you are willing, not forced, to take it the extra mile.
Now, I realize that I’m incredibly privileged to be in that position. And I’m even more privileged to be in a position to leave any position where I felt I was being abused. I’m simply pointing out that a willingness to occasionally work longer hours isn’t necessarily a hallmark of some sort of macho mentality, at least in my experience. It may be the sign of a person well-matched with their job.
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The most common form of exploitation I see is the eternal crunch time shops. The games industry, as you note, is the worst example of it, but there are just a lot of badly managed shops out there that just can’t get their act together. There are enough of them that they gave me an extensive professional education in what not to do, and made me a lot of money when I was hired to clean them up as a consultant.
Same here, and I believe that’s another big impediment to unionisation. American movement conservatism has promoted the bogus idea that “if you’re lucky enough to love your job you don’t need a union – they’re only for people who hate what they do.” Same goes for:
I’ve happily put in long hours on projects, but I learned very early on to make sure I was compensated for every single hour. And I never pretended it made me a macho man.
I’ve seen too many young male coders who don’t do the former (even as they crow about their annual salary) and too many who do the latter. The concept is so embedded in coder culture that on a recent episode of “Silicon Valley” it formed the basis of a joke, one where the “inspiring” ironman coder ended up so exhausted after working on what he loves for four days straight that he crashes through a plate glass wall (not the most embarrassing part of the collapse by a longshot).
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Not just eternal crunch time, but on-call production support.
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That is in fact all of them. Some just get to have the illusion of being able to protect themselves for longer.
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And typically both the ones who declare themselves Libertarians and many more who don’t, are in the Ayn Rand stage of intellectual (under?)development, rather than being actually in favor of ensuring actual liberty for all people in any meaningful sense. (Unless it’s the liberty to starve in a gutter because your parent’s couldn’t afford to pay to have you learn to code.)
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All of my data is either physical measurements, simulation results, or metadata about physical measurements and simulation results.
But he’s never personally had a bad experience, so obviously all of recorded history of the labor movement is wrong.
libertarian.txt.
Right on! I was an IBEW member for four years during the '90s - though as an electronics manufacturing tech rather than a true electrician. Then we moved to another state so my wife could be closer to her family, and the only work I could get was in a non-union shop. You could definitely tell the difference.
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The main difference between a union and non-union shop is the latter hasn’t been organised yet. Sign a card! Lead the way! Organize, organize, organize.
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I disassemble that remark!
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Hah, I got a copy of Atlas Shrugged on my shelf at home. Former Randian but got past that stuff when I read more Proudhon and Tucker. That really changed my views on things. It’s funny how mediocre Rand is but some how she keeps being propped up. If you want a female author that’s ten times better they should try Zora Neale Thurston. Their eyes were watching God is a far better book than even Fountainhead.
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Pardon my crudeness, but screw that noise. My day job is the most efficient and effective way I could find to fund things that really matter.
Roger that!
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I wonder if someone at Slack is busy adding Pinkerton Plus features to the usage analytics features already provided with the paid tiers; or will that be an arm’s length thing handled by a third party application that integrated with Slack APIs?
