[HN Gopher] The Burnout Machine
___________________________________________________________________
The Burnout Machine
Author : flxfxp
Score : 341 points
Date : 2025-03-20 18:24 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (unionize.fyi)
(TXT) w3m dump (unionize.fyi)
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| We joined the burnout machine under our own free will. What else
| did we expect? Moloch's not getting any less hungry.
| tejtm wrote:
| It was not the burnout machine when all of us joined.
| whstl wrote:
| Yep. It definitely wasn't the case 10 years ago.
|
| It became significantly worse, with way more micromanagement,
| less productivity and lower quality products.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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...
| convolvatron wrote:
| 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.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| "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.
| whstl wrote:
| 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.
| terminalbraid wrote:
| 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...
| stygiansonic wrote:
| The article mentions this union, not sure if it meets your
| definition of success:
| https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/our-wins
| shagie wrote:
| 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.
| dubrocks wrote:
| All that union managed to do is get various Google
| contractors fired for unionizing.
| whstl wrote:
| I have been part of quite successful unions in Germany and
| Latin America.
|
| Even participated on a strike once.
| Muromec wrote:
| 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.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| 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?
| Muromec wrote:
| 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.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| >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?
| linksnapzz wrote:
| 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?
| drpossum wrote:
| 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.
| Muromec wrote:
| 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.
| Muromec wrote:
| 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.
| rglover wrote:
| 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.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| 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.
| debacle wrote:
| I never worked harder in my life than when I worked for myself.
| rglover wrote:
| 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.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > 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.
| rglover wrote:
| 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.
| BeetleB wrote:
| 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.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 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
| film42 wrote:
| 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?
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| 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.
| film42 wrote:
| Great. Show me examples of teams who took that bet and how it
| paid off.
| test098 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_S
| t...
|
| pretty much every team in blue collar industries which have
| been able to negotiate better working conditions, better
| pay, and more time off.
| wyager wrote:
| But tech isn't a blue collar industry, and this is about
| tech unions.
| test098 wrote:
| 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
| wyager wrote:
| 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.
| test098 wrote:
| 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."
| mulnz wrote:
| 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.
| shagie wrote:
| 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
| busterarm wrote:
| 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.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| wyager wrote:
| > 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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...
| jimbokun wrote:
| Well yeah, isn't manual vs mental labor the classic blue
| collar/white collar distinction?
| Henchman21 wrote:
| 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
| busterarm wrote:
| 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.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| 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.
| mateo411 wrote:
| I agree. Unless you are programming Java.
|
| "Java is a blue collar language." - James Gosling
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| 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-...
| lr4444lr wrote:
| 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.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| 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._
| __loam wrote:
| > 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.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| __loam wrote:
| If they can offshore your job because you joined a union
| they can do so if you didn't join one too.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| 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.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Well clearly _you_ don't need a tech union.
| busterarm wrote:
| 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.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| > 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.
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| 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?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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_.
| franktankbank wrote:
| > Do you have children as your colleagues?
|
| Well...
| legitster wrote:
| Unionization, mandatory schooling, and work-life balance
| are all collective outcomes of industrialization and
| urbanization. Claiming that one caused the other is silly
| oversimplification.
| icedchai wrote:
| I've had plenty of colleagues that act like children.
| debunn wrote:
| 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.
| geodel wrote:
| > The bet is that if we collectively use unions correctly,
|
| This sounds awfully similar to when people were _holding
| their iPhones wrong_.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| 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.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| 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!!!
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Unions could address on-call rotations, that seems like a low
| hanging fruit.
| foota wrote:
| 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.,.
| Muromec wrote:
| 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.
| sophacles wrote:
| 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.
| parpfish wrote:
| 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
| test098 wrote:
| IFPTE, UAW, CWA (which just recently welcomed workers in the
| video game industry: https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/video-
| game-workers-launc...)
| film42 wrote:
| 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.
| shagie wrote:
| https://kickstarterunited.org/first-contract/
| test098 wrote:
| 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.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| > 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/
| SequoiaHope wrote:
| 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.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| 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.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| Or Sveriges Ingenjorer.
| singron wrote:
| 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.
| parpfish wrote:
| 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.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| 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.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| > 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).
| jajko wrote:
| 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.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| 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.
| jimbokun wrote:
| 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.
| limusrazor wrote:
| 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.
| sfpotter wrote:
| 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.
| Muromec wrote:
| 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.
| zer0zzz wrote:
| https://youtu.be/DwbzxemJZIc
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| 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.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| 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.
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| 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.
| dnissley wrote:
| I watched season 1 of severance. What did I miss? I don't
| remember any lessons on class consciousness
| daedrdev wrote:
| 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.
| sureglymop wrote:
| 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.
| wincy wrote:
| 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.
| jegp wrote:
| 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...
| umvi wrote:
| 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/In
| ternational_Brotherhood_of_T...).
| geodel wrote:
| 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.
| protonbob wrote:
| 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.
| abuani wrote:
| 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.
| robocat wrote:
| > 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.
| swatcoder wrote:
| 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.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| 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?
| arzke wrote:
| > 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.
| goostavos wrote:
| 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.
| zug_zug wrote:
| 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.
| orangecat wrote:
| 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.
| deedubaya wrote:
| 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.
| fullshark wrote:
| "As long as other jobs suck more, be grateful and don't
| investigate legal avenues to improve your life"
| mrbombastic wrote:
| 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%.
| deedubaya wrote:
| 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%.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| 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.
| nimih wrote:
| 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.
| deedubaya wrote:
| Thanks for the spell check!
| thom__ wrote:
| 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.
| ilc wrote:
| 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.
| thom__ wrote:
| 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!
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| sophacles wrote:
| 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.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| 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.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| 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.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| 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
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 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.
| logicchains wrote:
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| > 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
| Terr_ wrote:
| > 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.
| sophacles wrote:
| 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.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > 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.
| cyrnel wrote:
| > 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).
| dadrian wrote:
| What Big Tech companies are demanding 80 hours a week?
| philjohn wrote:
| Not demanding per se, but when you're stack ranked against
| people who ARE ...
| wyager wrote:
| 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.
| trinix912 wrote:
| 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.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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_.
| dnissley wrote:
| 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".
| umvi wrote:
| 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?
| rockemsockem wrote:
| 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
| didgetmaster wrote:
| 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.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I don't want a union... I want state licenses like doctors,
| nurse, lawyers, engineers, etc.
| shagie wrote:
| 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."
| finnthehuman wrote:
| 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.
| skywalqer wrote:
| Yeah, great, give programming a high entry barrier for new
| people. One of the worst ideas I've heard today.
| delichon wrote:
| 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.
| crawsome wrote:
| 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)
| wyager wrote:
| > 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.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Why do you need sustainability when you're making 400K a year at
| $EvilCorp? Just work for 5 years and retire.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| This line of argument would've sounded more plausible several
| fiscal quarters ago.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| My company doesn't speculate in stock market gambling so we
| have literally zero problems
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 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
| jas39 wrote:
| 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.
| rco8786 wrote:
| > 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.
| Foreignborn wrote:
| 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.
| tengbretson wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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).
| stared wrote:
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| > 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.
| jimbokun wrote:
| 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.
| dxxth wrote:
| 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.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >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.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| 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.
| captainbland wrote:
| 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.
| nchmy wrote:
| 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"
| d3ckard wrote:
| 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).
| cyrnel wrote:
| 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.
| __loam wrote:
| 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.
| nosefurhairdo wrote:
| 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?
| __loam wrote:
| 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.
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| > 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.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Most people actually don't work at immensely profitable
| FAANG companies.
| __loam wrote:
| 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.
| daedrdev wrote:
| 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.
| ornornor wrote:
| 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)
| WJW wrote:
| 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.
| nosefurhairdo wrote:
| 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?
| lurking_swe wrote:
| 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.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > 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.
| floriannn wrote:
| 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.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| > 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.
| achierius wrote:
| 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?
| jacobgkau wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| > 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.
| snozolli wrote:
| _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.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Would you like to remove all of the benefits unions have
| given you?
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Cross-posted to LinkedIn?
| simonask wrote:
| 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.
| ghiculescu wrote:
| No industry has 0% unemployment. Most people would kill for
| the employability of the median software engineer.
| roxolotl wrote:
| 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.
| bawolff wrote:
| > 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.
| chasd00 wrote:
| 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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > 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.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode"
|
| you have never done 80 hour weeks in software?
| blinded wrote:
| 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.
| aylmao wrote:
| 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.
| ohgr wrote:
| We're definitely not victims. It's impossible to rationalise
| what we do.
|
| Use this to your advantage.
| guelo wrote:
| 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.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| 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.
| Minor49er wrote:
| > 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
| woah wrote:
| 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.
| getnormality wrote:
| 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.
| ketzo wrote:
| > 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!
| oldjim69 wrote:
| Union now. Union tomorrow. Union Forever.
| taylorbuley wrote:
| 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.
| foxyv wrote:
| My company firewall blocked this for reason ()
|
| Uh, huh...
| JimTheMan wrote:
| 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.
| parpfish wrote:
| 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.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > 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.
| daedrdev wrote:
| 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.
| JimTheMan wrote:
| 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.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| > 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.
| JimTheMan wrote:
| 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.
| mproud wrote:
| 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.
| wincy wrote:
| 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.
| bravoetch wrote:
| 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.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| 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.
| m0llusk wrote:
| > 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.
| haburka wrote:
| 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.
| CaffeineLD50 wrote:
| 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
| namuol wrote:
| 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...
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| 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.
| maxrmk wrote:
| 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.
| sureglymop wrote:
| 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.
| maxrmk wrote:
| 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.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| 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.
| blueyes wrote:
| 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...
| nimish wrote:
| 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
| CaffeineLD50 wrote:
| 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.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Elon will do everything to stop this. It's a threat to his very
| existence
|
| How do I help
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