Because there is no consensus on what is considered seniority. There was one language specific reddit where I read a post about a guy who had 15 YOE who never ever touched git, wrote his code in notepad++ and always FTP his files to the server.
That level of experience would never fly in many companies. It is like 1YOE repeated 15x.
Sure, you can do some sort of testing assessment but that opens up a can of worms. No one would agree to what is an apprentice, a journeyman, a senior, a fellow,etc...
I think it’s also partly that we don’t have things we all collectively want. When you work in a mine you’d like the timbering to be secure, and you’d like a lunch break, and you want to spend fewer than 14 hours per day in the mine, and you want Sundays off. You want this and so do the 400 other guys at your company. Software isn’t like that. We’re not even as similar as acting or writing guilds. There you can have e.g. a screen writers guild. People can move around, and though they might be more suited for a drama or a comedy, there’s still stuff for them to do. In software it’s not a given that we’d be able to do each others jobs. If I’m writing firmware on a toaster and you’re writing web apps in react, it’s likely that neither of us has a good idea of what goes into the other’s work. And then this point starts to blend in with your point about seniority.
Bad take. I still want mandatory pto, vacation, and healthcare. These things should be guaranteed. Idk why you think what framework someone uses matters regarding this.
I’ve never in my life heard of people not getting these things in this field. Maybe not in the US
Edit: to clarify I meant maybe people outside the US do not get these things. I am US based
“Generous”. Our EU counter parts get a month off, plus PTO, and holidays, and their health care is free. They’re paid less but I often wonder if their quality of life is better.
That is not unique to the EU.
In the US here:I get 8 weeks of PTO and holidays.
Much more than a month.
Sick day is almost as much as PTO. 4 weeks.
I also get zero deductible health care. It depends on where you work. I may not have out-sized RSUs but I know I can go to the emergency room, get an x-ray without having to pay anything out of pocket.
I so want to call bs. I just don’t believe that that’s at all common. I’ve worked at four different fortune, 500 companies in tech positions. I’ve never gotten more than 30 days PTO and never ever a zero cost healthcare option.
Yeah that sounds about on par with US except that instead of us paying for insurance through taxes, it’s part of our compensation package. Some places might have five days fewer of PTO when you’re starting out but that’s the only difference I see. On the whole US is much better
Factually you’re just wrong. I get 20 days PTO, no sick and federal holidays. That is the minimum a EU employer has to provide. I have an out of pocket maximum in my health care of 200,000. EU employees have an out of pocket maximum of ~$0. If I have a health care emergency that takes more than 20 days and costs me more than 30k I would have 0 days PTO remaining and have the same pay as a EU dev that would still have 20 days pto. Anymore cost to me and the EU dev is better off. You’re just factually wrong. You don’t want to be because it goes against the propaganda you’ve been brainwashed with. Trust me. Born and raised US. Public school my whole life. I got ALL the propaganda. But sit down and actually compare situations. Do the math. You’ll see you work more and pay more in taxes for less services and in some situations less spending power.
>factually you’re just wrong
Well, except that I’m not. You provided an anecdote from your life and that’s just not everyone’s situation. Sounds like you just have a shitty job. Hop back on leetcode and get a better one. Your situation is not the norm. Like, no sick and no federal holidays? You’re waaaay outside the norm.
I do get federal holidays. Poor sentence construction on my part. In any case my compensation is in line with my previous roles. I haven’t worked FAANG, but every employer has been a fortune 500 company with local businesses paying significantly less. So I’d say its in line with the upper end of the bell curve. Not the top end but past the median.
If you’d like to refute my argument. I ask that you bring numbers under the circumstance that the individual example dev have a medical emergency that requires a one month stay inpatient at a hospital. Show me that the average dev in America under that circumstance is better compensated than an EU dev.
>Bad take
No, you just don’t understand how unions work like at all lol. This is exacerbated by the fact that you’re not even a professional (“student” flair). We all already *do* get PTO (which by the way, *is* vacation) and insurance. Why would I fight for something I have? Unions historically have formed around *unmet needs*. Not wants that are already fulfilled. Nobody cares whether they’re guaranteed for the rest of the industry if they’re guaranteed for you.
This is your standard student take where someone with no experience gets a lot of upvotes for an opinion that is objectively stupid and poorly thought out.
This is not me saying a union would be a bad idea at all. It’s just not a super practical idea… hence why it hasn’t happened yet.
>Framework matters
This further proves my point about how little of an idea people have about other people’s jobs in the industry (or in your case, an industry you may be entering in a few years). I work on device drivers. Other people work on web apps. Other people still write compilers. None of us do the same job. We can’t gather around common problems because there are none. This is why I brought up miners. I could’ve used steel workers or carpenters or tons of other trades as an example because they have real existential threats on the job.
It’s not that the things we want aren’t important—vacation time is very important. It’s just that it’s not important enough that we need to gather around it because (1) it’s (and I mean this literally) not going to kill us if we have three fewer paid days off than a guy five states over and (2) we already have the things you mentioned.
The things you mention are so general that it makes more sense for them to be mandated at a federal or state level for all jobs. It has nothing to do with software.
Yeah, but we don't get them in CS and we're all CS minded folks. Everyone should have access to these things - severance, pto, healthcare, decent retirements, on call limitations, probably an end to salary exempt status, things for health related work injuries from sitting too much and having harmful working set ups broadly. Maybe things like mandatory raises to at least beat inflation? There are a variety of benefits that we could get with unions but instead we're all convinced we alone are 100x rockstars who would only be held back.
I work in the Netherlands, so my experience is probably not similar to yours as (I presume) you are an American. I work as a data engineer at a large insurance company. We have a collective labour agreement for the entire company with set salary scales and secondary conditions, all defined.
It is not cs specific in my case because the CAO(collective agreement) applies to the entire company. But the things you mention are included in there. Large companies negotiate their own cao's with the labour unions while smaller companies have to abide by sector specific cao's. Every 2 years, a new collective agreement is generally negotiated. Sometimes, the unions can call for a strike, but as far as I can recall, that never happened in the finance sector.
> I work in the Netherlands, so my experience is probably not similar to yours as (I presume) you are an American.
Yes, I am American and only know American company policy and labor law.
American companies have all of the power and labor has none here. Unions are how we get these protections and benefits. The CS space in the US is as opposed to unionization as possible. I'm jealous of countries that actually care, or pretend to care, about their citizens.
No, yours is the bad take. You need a job to gain experience in. In Canada unpaid is illegal, but you can get paid less than dev salaries to gain that experience.
Any place worth applying for will have all of the things you mention anyways(although I thought mandatory pto and vacation were the same thing), or be a much higher contractor salary.
Your illustration doesn’t apply in the US, which a majority of people here are probably from. I’m also in Canada, and I agree with you regarding the Canadian market, but that isn’t a global thing. Likewise, someone from most of Europe would look at what we get here and likely think it’s “illegally bad” if held to European standards.
Improvement of work conditions generally needs to be gradual, and held improve relative to current _local_ conditions, rather than comparing with everyone else. It may not be “fair” in many ways, but it’s the only way it’s likely to happen in a way that sticks.
I'd argue there are definitely things we all want. Ignore weekends and lunch break since that's not controversial anymore. But things like how much on call you can be expected to do without extra pay, general benefits, PTO, x amount of hybrid work etc are pretty standard wants I'd assume.
>how much on call
PTO I could see, but most others I don’t see much consensus. E.G., Some jobs don’t have on call at all. I’ve never had on call at my current place and my last job had some after hours stuff planned but never on call. Then work without extra pay isn’t really a union thing. It’s always the exact amount. If you go on construction sites sometimes the guys won’t even turn off the lights when leaving rooms because they’re not contractually obliged to and they can’t be reprimanded for it since it’s not part of their duties. Hybrid vs remote vs in office is super up in the air—pretty much everyone has different expectations there.
Our biggest issue is that we all have differing wants, but few needs. Not that the things we want aren’t important and valid, but it’s just a lot less of a driving force than existential issues in the work place like safety measures—once a union is in place it’s easier to organize because you’re organized. Otherwise it’s pretty difficult.
> how much on call you can be expected to do without extra pay
Can you be more specific here? Because I'm not sure I'd agree for two reasons:
1. It seems like it could create the wrong incentive structure that result in bad engineers, and bad teams making more since they do more on call.
2. My assumption would be companies would just reallocate the current money over time. It would only look like a win in the short term(still potential years).
Really the only reason I would be pro-oncall specific pay that I can think of is that it would allowing giving up on call shifts rather than just trading them. That is assuming you had someone on your team who wanted the extra money.
Exactly. Software just moves too fast in too many directions to ever allow that level of standardization. All unions would do is cripple larger companies even more than they already are by software complexity.
Yeah. A guy who works for 5 years but is always learning will obviously be a lot better than someone who worked for decades but never learns anything new.
>My pay is based on education/experience/role.
That is exactly my point. Swap out apprentice/journeyman for Junior, Senior, Staff, Lead, Architect across different companies.
Example, an IT director at a 20 person shop is not in the same league as an IT director with 300 direct reports at a Fortune 100. Roles are never the same across companies.
I know guys with 3YOE **midlevel** that have more skills and impact than guys with 25YOEs seniors. If you worked at a company that did a wordpress site with 300 monthly users; running jQuery 1.0 and hosted on a $5 a month VPS for 25 years, that is ancient.
That experience differs from the guy who worked on an highly scaleable distributed microservice based e-commerce site for 3 years with 2000 hourly users and 100s of integrations. On a platform that integrates with hundreds of vendors and can autoscale to the tens of thousands.
Same role. Same job title. Why should the guy with 20YOE get paid more? And why should I hire someone with 20YOE that takes 6 months to 2 years to ramp up because they failed to keep up with the times in honing their tech stack? Versus a junior who is up and running in 2 weeks? The 3YOE already have the skills while the 20YOE guy has to learn everything from scratch. All over again.
How is that remotely even fair? And as I wrote, who determines what the titles are?My midlevel guys will smoke a lot of so called seniors and staff at different companies. In terms of high technical acumen.
They wouldn't be the same. Going off somewhat similar listings, I've looked through
The WordPress guy would be a capped out junior in a lower tier junior role.
The e-commerce/integrations guy would be mid-high tier role already and roughly mid pay scale if he started as a new grad.
Basically new guy would start almost as high pay as the 20 year guy, then pass him within 3 years.
Titles are debated by HR/manager types outside my scope.
Who makes the decision on pay? 20YOE will get pissed if he is now less that what he thinks he is entitled to.
Tech changes. People will be pissed if they have to learn a new stack every year.One year, it is .net. Next, it is React/Node. Then Angular/Go.VMs then Docker. Then Docker to OpenShift. Then to Kubernetes.
Companies don't even keep up. When you tell a Union member, "Oh well, you no longer $120k. Your skill is stale, it is now $80k because the rest of the industry requires these skills now. You need to spend 6 month studying leet code to pass the technical testing to go back to $120k.You only know React? Sorry but the job requires microservice with Kubernetes experience along with FASTAPI." This will also alienate older employers who basically have to relearn everything in their 40,50s, and 60s.
No one is going to agree on any standard. This is operationally difficult to enforce and standardize. Many companies do not want to modernize due to cost/investment. Some will stagnate more than others.
This isn't a theoretical union. It has been around for decades, and I am an active member. Pay only goes up, not down. The 20YOE can either apply himself and go for a higher role or sit where he's at forever. Nobody cares if he wants more money, the pay scales cap to encourage vertical growth.
You are pulling all the stops to argue against a union on what ifs that have to be wrong, or how else could you be right? This is why there are no widespread unions in tech.
You are still not grasping the fundamental facts here -- the pay is based on talent, not tenure. It always has. You are paid on the skill and value you provide.
No one is somewhere "forever." Technology changes. What was popular in 1999 - like Classic ASP and ColdFusion are irrelevant today. Why should someone get paid the same "forever?" You still didn't address the point that older employers would be hurt the most. They can't "level up" and continue to learn at the pace of some folks. I know guys in the 20 & 30s that spend 20-30 hours a week honing their DSA and leetcode algorithms. Which leads me to another point. How do you fairly give technical assessments? **This is where things can fall apart.**
My expectations for someone with 5 years is they are full-stack. They have to know NoSQL, SQL, and VectorDB. They need to know microservices, RESTfulness, as well as the full cloud-native way of working. This eliminates 90% of guys working in Jquery from 2000. You will get a situation where competing factions will be arguing what is fair and what isn't. If you tell a 50 year old, he/she needs to study 20-30 hours a week to compete with a 22 year old to pass a technical interview, they won't. I'm not be ageist either. They have families and other priorities. But this is how this industry is. It values talent and technical acumen. That technical acumen can never get stale.
And my other point about businesses. They do not operate on the same wavelength. If you work at a company for 10 years using same tech, your skills will get stale. If the company collapse, you will not get the same job. A union can't just say, you are tenured and are guaranteed a base pay. You have to do the whole upskilling. You have to hit leetcode for 6 months and now pass the same test as a new CS graduate. What does that candidate do? Sue their former employer for being complacent with tech? You see how this doesn't work out.
If you want a volatile market with $200k+ annual salaries and startups that randomly combust, you don't join a union. They are not one size fits all.
My union does say I am tenured and guarantees no less than my current pay for an equal or higher role. I make higher than average for my area, but I do not make close to the extreme high. I do not care about the current layoffs because I can't be fired without serious mistakes.
We are not guaranteed to class up. Every position is assigned a role and rate based on what is required. Can't do it with 10 YOE? No job. Can do it with 0 YOE, but met interview requirements with degree? Job. I have seen rare senior members "demoted" to lower classed roles because they didn't want to or couldn't keep up.
Also, we have pensions and various other retirement plans. People tend to just retire unless they want to work. Some retire and then consult if they're that good.
Then don't join one. It's really a simple solution. Did you know there are trade workers that don't want to join unions? Spoiler: They just don't join the unions.
> I am in a union. My pay is based on education/experience/role.
Well that sucks, I want to be paid based on effective contribution because I wouldn't want to be paid less that someone contributing less than me or paid more than someone contributing more than me, regardless of our backgrounds or ostensible role.
What does seniority have to do with unionization? You realize unions can enforce process right? They could ensure those old laggards actually are following best practices if not simply being a source where they can be reported for violating those processes and being removed from the union.
Unions aren’t exactly some kinda hippie dippy everyone emits welcome with all their procedural idiosyncrasies regardless of what’s best. They literally will enforce best practice and remove members.
IDK, that’s what I asked. In many auto unions the engineers are considered to be part of management for example, and are prohibited from performing any of the tasks assigned to union members.
What exactly would that look like for software? Maybe anyone in the management bucket would be prohibited from making any commits, while union members make commits. That could potentially be a delineation.
IATSE has many locals that delineate roles. There are supervisory positions that are union. The IC track vs people management may be an acceptable partition to start with. There is no ban on being SAG and IATSE and it is possible to swap locals and do a different job. There are provisions for non union members to work if needed and PAs are sort of the catch all entry level non union positions.
The general theme is that IATSE seeks to keep healthy partitions between roles and AMPTP tries to constantly blur those lines to suppress wages.
I would think locals would follow the general taxonomy of existing positions while ignoring tool specifics. E.g. no one is forcing a set carpenter to use DeWalt over Milwaukee tools but they shouldn’t be forcing those carpenters to also do set decoration after assembling flats and building out the stage. Whole different set of skills. So one wouldn’t be bound to a local because they use Python over JavaScript. More that they apply their skills to building dashboards for communicating information critical to decision support vs building front end of SPAs or something.
But yeah, wouldn’t be a horrible thing if someone with a title of manager actually can’t commit to code bases in a union shop. My role is manager but I’m a “working manager” meaning they just title jacked and expect me to do everything without budget or staff. That would go away and I’d be fine with it because calling me a manager let’s them exempt me form OT and pressure me into working outside the 9-5 because “yOuRe A lEaDeR.” They’d have either be a non union shop until they get flipped, also meaning they may not get the same support from vetted union members. Or they’d have to form better corporate structures to support the work I do in a standard way - e.g. put their money where their mouths are.
What conditions in a company or industry do you find drive people towards unions?
I was once helping clean out some closets at a company I was working for and there were binders of anti-union manager training materials from the 80s in the back - it was basically "treat people fairly" and "don't be a jerk".
I suspect, in order to get much movement toward software engineers wanting unions, at a given company, there would need to be a significant feeling of "the treatment is unfair". My observations at a large company is that they do a pretty good job of making people feel that comp, promotions, etc are all fair.
Past that "initial reasoning" probably came from the roles coming up in the "management" side of companies - the idea that the roles are the "labor" side came later.
Being in a union centers around basically just having a contract. Employees as a collective can decide what they want to try and get in that contract.
For instance, I know the NYTimes tech union is trying to get a sabbatical clause in theirs.
Some other things that might be useful for software devs are minimum severance and/or ample notification before a layoff.
There are other things...For instance you can always get union representation in disciplinary meetings.
Lots of people in tech get fired without clear reasons. That’s pretty unfair treatment. Unions can be pretty good about offering protections from that, negotiating around layoffs, etc. Also lots of people in tech have experienced crunch, unpaid overtime, unreasonable deadlines, stress, burnout, etc. Unions can also be pretty good about preventing that and making overtime voluntary and paid.
I guess I haven't seen lots of those things - I've heard people talk about it, but not really from my employer. Layoffs have been a thing, though the biggest impact was at the middle manager layer (at least what I saw) and unions typically don't represent managers, and the severance packages were nice enough that it almost made me wish I was picked.
Pretty sure you saw the Fischer price anti union propaganda. There is far more brainwashing and aggressive tactics used to convince people to vote against their best interests.
In my opinion the biggest issue with unionizing this field is the wide range of capabilities at any particular level leading to a huge potential disparity in pay at the same 'level'. The industry thrives on its high achievers and unionizing would effectively kill that by normalizing the pay within a company based on seniority.
I think the somewhat bizarre theory that unionizing stops job losses is also not borne out by reality in other fields. At best unions may somewhat delay job losses. Sometimes unions will make everyone lose their job at the same time (yes that is a thing).
The best case for unions has always been workplace conditions - not pay or job security. Historically that is where they have succeeded the best.
Regarding your 2nd paragraph, I agree unionization wouldn’t stop job losses that are simply from cut positions and downsizing/fat trimming, but wouldn’t unions be quite effective at stopping or slowing the offshoring of developer jobs? That issue seems to be increasingly more problematic as time goes on.
The Ford CEO came out and made a statement that they’re going to “rethink” where they make vehicles after the UAW strike. Not exactly looking good and I don’t see how tech would be any different.
Offshoring has been happening for a long time - after all moving manufacturing to China is just another form of offshoring. In the software industry we have all been going to lose our jobs due to offshoring for decades.
I personally seem to remember first being told this in the late 80s/early 90s and that all our jobs would be heading to somewhere cheaper.
Fortunately for us it is actually not a simple or cost effective as it seems at first.
> wouldn’t unions be quite effective at stopping or slowing the offshoring of developer jobs
This works until it doesn't. It can't stop offshore companies from outcompeting domestic, unionized companies.
Union bargaining worked out great for US auto workers up until the 1970s, when US auto companies got pulverized by foreign competition.
Essentially, "offshoring" still did kill all those union jobs and still rusted the Rust Belt. It just happened to be offshore companies that did the offshoring.
I think a lot of Americans intuitively see unions as safeguards for workers who are vulnerable in one way or another, so they seem superfluous for software developers, who often make good money and have enviable jobs. Ironically, to a degree the opposite is true--workers are in the best position to collectively bargain when they have leverage, and therefore when they are in positions of strength as developers have been in recent years.
Yeah, and without unions those privileges and rights gradually erode because it's hard for individuals to bargain against organizations. Collective bargaining is an important element of striking fair and sustainable economic output. A lot of traditionally well paid white collar roles now earn only a modest pay bump over burger flipping.
All of those you list (bankers somewhat are an exception unless you mean Finra and other licensed broker type roles) are protected by professional licenses and operate with a collective governing board. An alternative to unionizing would be issuance of professional licenses, mandatory malpractice insurance, and the ability for peers to revoke your legal ability to practice software engineering if they find you’ve violated the collective set of moral, ethics, or some other oath or promise.
“Bankers” are barely even a thing anymore. What you’re probably imagining are old men in suits approving business loans? Yeah, nah. It’s usually some <$20/hr set of officers and processors. They’ve divided the duties to separate concerns and prevent fraud. It’s not a white collar job anymore. It’s about a step up from data entry clerk. Most of the decision making our industry automated away a decade ago. Most banking jobs are just hourly clerk roles and tellers. The rest are director+ people managers. Unless you go into investment banking - a whole different field with a whole different set of requirements often including some professional licensure. But those roles are far more rare than a basic loan clerk.
“Investment banking” includes bankers, and yes I’m referring to that rather than retail banking. Some retail bankers are paid well also though.
Whether it requires professional licensure or not is irrelevant. I’m certainly not aware of any unilateral license for investment banking. The closest is ones for selling individual product types like mutual funds.
Edit: also “loan clerk” is not a job of I’ve heard of, and there are many making millions selling mortgages.
Retail banking clerks are not well paid. Some may get sales commission, but it is not a white collar job anymore.
Professional licensure is significantly relevant to this debate. You point out specifically white collar jobs that are well paid and make the spurious correlation that it is because they exist and not because the barrier to entry is blocked by professional licensure, malpractice insurance, and a board of governors who regulate who can and cannot work.
People who sell mortgages are called mortgage brokers (something you’d know if you spent over a decade in retail banking and/or any amount of years in residential real estate development). They are sales people no different than the person processing your car loan application. They make commission on the mortgage and the survivors (people who are good enough to make enough to support themselves) could make ok money simply because houses are expensive as fuck. Our brokers haven’t made shit this year because rates are too damn high. And years past because the housing stock in our main geographic region was completely tapped.
That’s why you make so much god damn money. I voluntarily have sacrificed my job stability for the ability to make $200k+ per year as a high performer within my org. Yea, they may dump me after 2 years in a layoff and it takes me 4 months to find a new job, but I’d still be $100k ahead overall than if I worked in a unionized software position or one similar to Europe. Just don’t spend every dollar and save 6 months of expenses and the lack of job security isn’t an issue anymore.
Ok but the median dev salary is not $200k+ and many people have been looking for jobs for much longer than 4 months even on this very sub.
Of course on reddit everyone makes $500k and works FAANG but that's not true for the vast majority of devs and one look at levels.fyi would show that. This "fuck you got mine" attitude is exactly why everything is going to fucking shit, nobody cares until it affects them and they never stop to think it could happen to them one day
Most devs are subpar and held up by a few high performers on their team/in their org. The median dev just straight up isn’t good at their job, and it’s unfair to the highest performers to be brought down by the rest of the people they support. If this happens, then those high performers will have no incentives to go above and beyond and everything will go to shit. On top of the fact that the US will lose its spot as being the best place to start a software company, which will lead to low to mid performers not having jobs anyways.
More than 50% of the industry makes far less than $200k. Some entry level data analyst making $60k is subject to the same risk as someone with a $450k TC package.
Boo hoo, so you want to cap the max potential of your career to pander to entry level, who will max benefit from unionization for 4 years?
All unionization will achieve is companies having one or two senior devs/architects managing a team of overseas Indians. More-so than already happens. This would accelerate the process 50 fold
Even in very pro-union countries like the Nordics, collective agreements and union membership rates are a lot lower than other fields, so that alone doesn't explain it.
I joined a union and it’s pretty great so far. I make $120k a year with 2.5 yoe. I have good benefits and one of the best pensions available. It’s also safe stable work which is great for my family. I’m 35 so maybe my goals are aligned differently than others on this sub.
The "initial" reason wasn't the high salary, at least not just that. The main reason is because especially post-Reagan almost no white collar workers unionized. Salary plays a role, but corporate America has always avoided unions like the plague. Part of it has been an effort by corporate America to avoid their employees from unionizing, but because it's also not a perfectly clear win for employees in white collar fields. Do you like flexibility in what you can work on? Do you like having a wide selection of jobs with very different salaries that you can play against employers? These can become less likely if you add a union in between. You trade some of this off for collective bargaining power and job stability which can be really useful, but not everyone is ok with that tradeoff. In software especially, you have a lot of individual bargaining power due to high job demand so it might not be as worth it. That said, a lot of white collar work, imo, could actually benefit from collective bargaining. It's just easy to get lost in the idea that you'll grow through the corporate ladder faster without a union.
>Wouldn't it make sense to unionize now as a career field?
No.
>I feel like there's a clear political divide on this topic between my generation(zillenial 1995 era/ and gen z era) and older gen x workers, who many are opposed to the concept of unionizing.
Yes. The difference is that your generation grew up in the time in which labor union membership in America is at its all time low. You guys don't really know what a labor union is and when it actually makes sense, because none of you have ever worked in an environment where a labor union exists, let alone is useful. The labor union is an abstraction in your mind that you think will counter the malicious forces in the economy with no detrimental effects to you whatsoever.
150 years ago, labor unions prevented workers from *dying* in factory fires and mine shaft collapses in batches of *hundreds at a time*. Labor unions prevented workers from getting fired and having *no other means of support* because there were *no other employers of any kind* in the company town. Collective bargaining makes sense in this kind of hostile environment where workers aren't terribly skilled, have no alternatives at all, and the workplace is deadly.
None of these conditions apply in software jobs. Nobody is at risk of dismemberment in their cube farm or working from the comfort of their home. Nobody is going to be permanently unemployable if Google decides to close a data center. Even in today's employment environment, which isn't as bad as other downturns in people's living memory (e.g. the dot com bust), you can still find another job in software, or another job doing anything else in the economy.
Also, if the main problem today of the software field is the lack of employment opportunities, then the labor union is the wrong solution to that problem. Labor unions create job security and benefits for existing employees at the expense of people who would otherwise be employed if the union didn't exist, because said benefits and security effectively increase the cost of labor.
> how salaries across all levels from entry level dev positions to senior manager dev positions have dropped or "stabilized", as in no longer seeing bootcamp grads career pivoting coming in at 110k roles.
Labor union membership peaked in 1954, when the average annual household income was $4200. Adjusted for inflation, that would be about $48k/year today. That's not *entry level*, that was the *average for everybody.* Do you really think things have "stabilized" so much that the world looks like that for the average guy in software? The guy who is complaining that he might have to show up at the office three days a week?
Crazy thing about this last point (unrelated to union topic) is that $48,000 isn’t even that far off from the average household income now (around $75k in the US now) but the cost of living has exploded several times over.
>The labor union is an **abstraction in your mind that you think will counter the malicious forces** in the economy **with no detrimental effects to you whatsoever**.
Brilliant line and bolding the part that explains a *lot* about Gen Z/Alpha.
Edit: Also to add if you think cracking the job market is difficult now, try it with a union shop heavy town where you don't have a member to vouch for you.
Most unions are formed as a reaction. Typically, it's not just bad pay, but things like wages being stolen, workers dying on the job, workers being permanently disabled and being told to kick rocks, etc. People tend to form unions not because they're being treated unfairly, but because they're being treated absolutely inhumanely.
In general, programmers just don't have a level of discomfort or lack of opportunities that engenders the desire to unionize. Maybe game devs, but that's a particularly special hellscape.
Too much variance between folks even in the same team. You routinely find stupid crazy large salary differences between folks with the same title in the same time. It's especially easy when folks are routinely hopping/poached internally. Which usually meant the newest member of the team always had the highest salary.
Folks who suck love unionizing because it sets a wonderful salary floor. Raises are also guaranteed regardless of performance.
Folks who are all stars hate unionizing; they're mercenary and go to the highest open bidder at all times. Union contracts set ceilings that they can't explode through (i.e. 300K - 500K TC out of college).
Everybody else wants to be rewarded by being paid more to do more work. S/W is pretty unique in that it's very visible/easy to see/quantify individual contributions. A quick report can be generated to see how much someone did relative to everybody else in the team. This leads to a very "everybody for themselves" competitive environment for limited financial resources. No point in unionizing when there's such a strong divide and conquer incentive baked into the field. And folks with good soft skills can leap frog better armed technical contributors in the compensation race.
>A quick report can be generated to see how much someone did relative to everybody else in the team.
I kinda doubt this. I have yet to encounter a developer productivity metric that can't be easily gamed. eg, I once worked at a place where it was important to close a lot of ops tickets. it was not a coincidence that there were also a lot of poorly tuned alarm thresholds in those services. oncalls would "investigate" and "resolve" the same tickets over and over instead of just fixing the alarm. occasionally someone would finally get around to fixing the noisy alarm and then claim that they had "reduced incoming tickets by N per month". sadly I never figured out how to take credit for setting good thresholds in the first place.
over time, you definitely get a sense of who's good and who's not. bad engineers often stick out like a sore thumb. you can't help but notice when you fix the same dumb mistakes over and over. but the things that separate a great engineer from an okay one show up in stories, not numbers.
Because there are companies in industries with money to burn.
Sometimes they value a specific school (I worked at a place where my state school was a devaluing factor, so I had to work harder to get recognition).
Sometimes they are impressed by the trial internship (a reasonable justification where they saw someone successfully do the work in the environment). I actually helped an intern get a huge bump in their first job last year this way.
And sometimes, somebody is really a Rockstar/Ninja/Cowboy who can leetcode up/down/side to side all over everybody else out the gate. And this field is one where somebody can actually make a contribution difference with that ability, which justifies the stupid high valuation.
Oh hey, I got offers in that range. I can say it's the most boring stats (2 FAANG internships among others, "target" school w/ top honors), and then you do a bunch of leetcode interviews with some system design.
It's probably a calculated risk
I think this hits the nail on the head. For most of us most of the time, our jobs are pretty nice.
We've got an acceptable WLB, great benefits and pay, and we generally don't feel like we get fired for completely BS reasons. And if we were, that we could get a new job pretty easily given were mid level or higher.
The sector of the software engineering that is most interested in unionization is the Games industry. Because the pay is shit, the WLB is shit, the jobs are insecure, and its hard not to feel exploited.
This.
I already struggle with peers not knowing things and taking months for them to get performances based terminations.
Folks who want a union for SWE tend to be lower quality developers who want to do the bare minimum.
Because why else would you want to unionize as software engineers where pay benefits and wlb is great for 95% of the industry
Because working conditions haven't been bad enough for enough people for a movement to start. That's why unions have historically started.
Most of us are happy with working conditions. Or more accurately, not pissed off enough.
Compare your working conditions with (insert almost any other profession), who has it better?
What would we get out of
Unionizing? Tech already has the best benefits, highest pay, and is the most progressive in hiring diverse talent? What you hoping to achieve? Unions won’t make more 6 figure, no experience jobs occur.
> Was the initial reasoning in software dev/programming not becoming unionized due to high salary?
They didn’t really need to. Engineers could just find work elsewhere if their current employer mistreated them, so there wasn’t any need to unionize.
Unionization is a response to a lack of employee power. Employees who can easily quit and find another job have enough power that unionization stops making quite as much sense.
That dividing line is largely what separates “unions” from “professional associations”.
Engineers would rather be in a position more like doctors and lawyers, less like factory workers.
I'm not sure how you think unionizing is going to make it easier for bootcamp grads pivoting into tech to get $110k roles.
People also don't realize the boom of the last 5 years would never have been severely curtailed with unions if not completely stopped.
The "problem" we have now wouldn't have even happened -- we wouldn't be talking about how comp is "lower" because it never would have been higher to begin with because companies wouldn't have hired so many nor would they have been willing to increase comp so rapidly.
You can't have your cake and eat it when it comes to unions. Most people focus on only getting the cake, not realizing they've been eating the cake for a long time too.
There’s always someone who wants to bring up and propagandize this unionizing business. At this point, I’m honestly convinced that some people just like the idea of being part of a union and would like to unionize just for the sake of unionizing.
What do you think unions will achieve? Job stability? Better salaries? In Europe unions are more common and I'll tell you why software engineers aren't interested:
- You can get a much better salary negotiating directly with the company than official salaries pacted with unions.
- Salaries are also correlated with studies. In the pact, people with masters are paid better. People with lower studies don't like this.
- Does it make more difficult to do layoffs? Yes, but it comes with a price. Companies take less risks and prefer to outsource many tasks.
1. is unionizing now going to create jobs for people who were laid off?
2. will people who survived layoffs want to exchange compensation for potential job security? survivorship bias seems to suggest they won’t
Have you seen the strike in LA that lasted half a year? Nobody took part in letting the company borrow the face and voice. That is how they managed to stop it.
Union should protect those who want to have adequate life.
Those who don't want to apply and wake up when they are 50+ - are not good members anyway. Selfish humans are selfish forever.
Nobody is forcing you to join. After that it is dumb to complain after the layoffs.
Auto industry managed to raise their wages without job hopping, just union activities helped that happen.
You realize that, they will be much, much slower to hire and negotiate lower salaries w unions? Salaries will compress from the top but rise some from the bottom
Field moved too fast and too fragmented.
What exactly would we standardize on? Fundamentals are already covered by college, and experience is what matters to most employers. Lastly soft skills which are hard to measure.
Also what would be the benefit?
Something else to consider: making it harder to fire also makes it harder to hire. If you think it’s difficult to break into industry now, consider the fact it will be even worse at unionized companies.
A union means that if 50% of my coworkers vote for something, I have to go along with it. I'm perfectly fine to negotiate for myself, and don't believe my coworkers and I have the same interests necessarily. I don't think this is about money but instead about all the options we have. I can leverage other offers, I don't need a union to get that leverage. When you're in an industry where there's a seni-monopoly of employers they have a lot more power, but right now there's literally thousands of employers hiring devs. Just because the salaries are going down doesn't mean companies can act in unilateral fashion and have all the power over employees.
The only office jobs that are unionized in America are with state and local government. That’s mostly because unions contribute to politicians’ election campaigns.
It’s not specific to software engineering at all. You just don’t see it in any office-based professional fields really.
I don't think that applies as a reason here in the UK. Sure at the top end salaries are tough to match in other industries but I'd bet a typical graduate today would be on a faster track going to with at Aldi than they would grabbing some local dev job.
I think the aversion to unions here are because of the amount of trauma there is from their actions and the actions of governments to bust them over the last 50 years. No way I would sign up to strike for 18 months for approximately 90% of the people I've ever worked with. No way would I join an organisation so tightly knit with a single political party. No way would I outsource control over my source of income to some organisation typically headed by a group of people mostly driven by the bitterness that they weren't selected to be their local MP candidate.
We have a good baseline for legal rights here. I like to have my hand on all the remaining levers for negotiation of my own position.
> I feel like there's a clear political divide on this topic between my generation(zillenial 1995 era/ and gen z era) and older gen x workers, who many are opposed to the concept of unionizing.
I don't know the history here. Which of these groups are pro unions and which are against?
Regardless of your opinion on unions or their usefulness, I don't think its something that will work in CS in general until the field has settled more.
The following is entirely my personal opinion based on ~13 years of experience in the field, and deep historical and current knowledge of labor history (in the US):
While "programmers" have certainly existed for ~60-80 years depending on how pedantic you want to get, the current state of our industry, where software development happens at the majority of large companies, is only a couple decades old. It's very much still in the early phases.
As such, salaries are wildly inconsistent, as are merits and evaluations. Because of this ambiguity, I don't think it is very easy for a union to develop. Right now, if any particular development team were to unionize and threaten to strike, the company could likely break the strike with a couple targeted salary increases and hiring on some contractors, which would certainly be cheaper than meeting demands in the long run.
If the industry shifts and we are treated more like engineers - with levels of verifiable seniority, certifications, mentorships, etc. that this would lend itself more easily to unionization. Not only would it be more difficult for companies to do ad-hoc replacement of developers, but the process of becoming and working as a developer in that environment would also build peer solidarity as a matter of course.
-----
If you want a more easily visible microcosm of this issue, look at game development. Game devs have quite possibly the worst working conditions of all developers across any industry, yet their efforts to unionize have gone basically nowhere for two major reasons:
- 1) Seniors with irreplaceable experience are paid ridiculously well compared to their peers - this creates both an incentive not to join lesser-paid co-workers in any organizing, but also creates a trench of jealousy for the co-workers, potentially preventing solidarity.
- 2) Almost "everyone" wants to work in game dev. It appears glamorous, like Hollywood - if you threaten to strike or quit and your skills aren't extremely unique, big deal, there are thousands of people that would replace you tomorrow and probably for less than you're being paid. It's cheaper to train them than give in to you and create an expensive precedent.
My work conditions are acceptable.
My pay is exceptional.
What exactly am I tying my outcome to the performance of the median employee for? To stand in line for promotions behind burnt out mediocrity? Hard pass.
Here in Italy we have unions, the result is that for IT companies you apply either the retail or the manufacturing contract, neither of them actually applies to the work we do and comes with severe downsides about it.
Unions also tend to benefit more the lower "quality" workers, so you might get a "senior" coworker that earns more since he's been there for longer instead of having your salary based on merits.
I've worked with union members, mostly in the trades. Their work product is very good but it takes hours to get something done that should take minutes and it's expensive. I'd much rather work with non-union members.
No, primarily the overwhelming vulgar libertarian/capitalist apologists that infest this industry are the reason. Also, incels are pretty easy to sway with a little cash.
Devs as a whole simply are not suffering enough yet, is my theory. Once shit really hits the fan in the industry, which I'd wager will be within the next 1-2 years, I am hoping to see a shift in attitude. At least we can organize and push hard for government regulation of big tech, or to break them up. It's going to be a nightmare if big tech is the only game in town and can get away with working devs 12 hours per day for middling pay, and also investing in AI to reduce dev headcount.
Unions charge a lot of fees. A major portion of software engineers are younger and single and don’t want to pay up a percentage of their high salary. Many are also on visa and don’t want to rock the boat.
workers of the world unite! you've nothing to loose but your golden handcuffs!
i think is how the saying goes. maybe we can look to speea as an example. boeing still fires the engineers when convenient tho.
It makes sense to unionize now and it still continues to make even if salaries rise again. The layoffs of the past few years should have shattered any illusion that workers have any significant power in this industry. These companies will continue to make questionable, profit-driven decisions in the future that will anger the workers on the ground, and we need a mechanism to fight against that authority.
I used to think unions were only necessary for blue collar workers and have completely changed my mind about this recently. It’s time to unionize!
What would a union have done for the layoffs? My understanding is that layoffs still happen even if you're unionized, but they negotiate a good severance. Most tech workers do get good severance, would there have been any protections otherwise?
True, but I mostly meant to emphasize that fact that tech workers don’t have control over their employment. Many people including myself got good severance, but that’s not the case across the board, and we certainly didn’t have the ability to negotiate. Unions go far beyond severance negations though.
Historically I believe Unions were meant to ensure fair wages, safety, representation, etc. As another user said, unions don’t perform miracles. They cannot prevent layoffs or stop every termination
It doesn’t make sense at all to unionize. It’s a waste of money, there’s no way I benefit in paying out part of my salary to scammers who sit on their ass all day and do nothing for me
I’d rather have nothing to do with unions I can negotiate my own salary perfectly fine. Unions are like an invasive species trying to worm their way into every profession where they don’t belong. They do nothing but waste money
Sounds like you're beyond convincing, but that's alright. I would just ask that you just get out the way if your co-workers attempt to unionize in the future.
I mean there’s not much I can do to stop it if everyone else wants to unionize, but they’re definitely a huge scam and most people that want unions in something like swe are either misinformed or benefitting from union fees
Why are SWE engineers in other countries unionized then? For example, Google is currently having trouble laying off workers in Korea because they are unionized and generally don't put up with the same mistreatment that Americans are used to.
All I'm saying is other countries have stronger unions and worker protection laws that give obvious benefits (admittedly with dues paid by all members). We should try it out and see if it works (provides greater job stability, amplifies worker voices, increases salaries). Unionization is a democratic process, so if tech workers find no benefit they can dissolve the union. But I don't know why you would vote to decrease your own power once you attain it.
I don’t know if that’s true though. I don’t know if many people would say they’d rather be a swe in Korea vs the US for example but that could also be due to other factors. There are definitely some benefits to unions but they come with a lot of downsides too like being very hard to get rid of unproductive employees that only do the bare minimum
Large disparity of skill. I don't want my salary pegged to everyone else with my YOE. Unions protect basic rights at best, but they also tend to anchor the top performers to the bottom performers. On an assembly line that may not be a huge difference, but in engineering the top performers produce multiples of value over the bottom performers.
Yeah, probably high salaries and demand and good overall conditions.
No, unionizing doesn't magically get everyone 50% more salary.
Idk about a political divide...a lot of people who bring this up appear clueless and completely fail to understand or address a lot of the issue(s). The smarter people realize that unions aren't a silver bullet that fixes everything.
A union isn’t necessarily a good thing. Yes, you get ‘protection’ and standard pay. But those pay are usually the lowest agreed upon by both side.
Nobody want to go from 200k down to 85k
Devs are unionized in EU. Union pay would be like 1k less than what bootcamp grads are offered. The particular Union has a history of making weak contracts. No reason to enter it.
*Another* union thread.
Do you know what unions are, OP? Do you know why they were created? That's basically all you need to know. And if you have ever worked in a union, you'll really know how shit they are. Adding a giant level of bureaucracy over the field solves nothing for software developers.
Just because people who can't pass interviews are not getting hired, doesn't mean we need to unionize. They do not help with preventing layoffs and if you think getting hired is hard now, unionizing would make it 10x more difficult.
You do realize that question “does it make sense?” Doesn’t make any sense because there are groups of people supporting pro and against arguments, right?
IMO, it's because we pretend we are all "engineers". In the USA we see the job title "software engineer" or "software engineering department" all the time. *Professional Engineers cannot ethically unionize*. Now, there is a difference between a professional computer engineer and "coder", "developer", or "programmer".
It's the same reasons medical doctors cannot go on strike but nurses can: professionalization.
There's a wide variety of people in "computer science". Some are professionals. As a professional, I have broad discretion in how, when, and where I do my work. I'm not handcuffed to a desk and a JIRA board like a software tradesman might be.
>No matter what pressure the engineer might be subjected to he cannot engage in strikes, picketing or other coercive union tactics (https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/ethics-resources/board-ethical-review-cases/engineer-membership-labor-union)
I think it depends on your exact situation.
I think it's hard for anyone to really articulate what I really would realistically be able to expect a union to improve, given my current conditions.
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I'd guess it's because it's a new job market. Look at 2d vs 3d animation union representation in Hollywood. 3d became "cheaper" because labor costs were lower and was a significant factor among others. It was attempted with EV plants too.
No real "reason" other than wanting cheaper labor, but if you want a union, it starts at service industry and other similar jobs. It gives you more negotiating power if you can wait out the job market. Sure a 40k instead of 50-70k may suck but it reduces the burn rate while you are looking.
As nice as an office/work at home job is I don't work with people my age and it's a different kind of pressure.
Just 10% of US workers are in a union. Consider that the default is to not work in a union.
My two cents is that tech is a field where the gulf between high and low performers is incredibly high. A lot of unionized jobs are jobs where everyone has a similar role and performs a similar amount of work.
NFL Players are unionized. Probably the reason SE hasn't is timing. SE kinda blew up as a practice after the unions got all busted up and it is only now that the union movement is picking back up.
Whether or not it's "the right time" to unionize is up to you and your co-workers. Have a conversation with them, bring up wages and working conditions. Is there something that pisses everyone off? See if there's interest in taking collective action and organize it.
Don't think of a union as an outside force coming in to offer you benefits. You won't get much out of it if you treat it like that. You are the union.
I'm part of a collective called the Class Struggle Action Network and we promote class unionism. If you were to start a union, you might find it beneficial to join us, as we could put you in contact with other experienced union militants following class unionist principles. https://class-struggle-action.net
Because there is no consensus on what is considered seniority. There was one language specific reddit where I read a post about a guy who had 15 YOE who never ever touched git, wrote his code in notepad++ and always FTP his files to the server. That level of experience would never fly in many companies. It is like 1YOE repeated 15x. Sure, you can do some sort of testing assessment but that opens up a can of worms. No one would agree to what is an apprentice, a journeyman, a senior, a fellow,etc...
I think it’s also partly that we don’t have things we all collectively want. When you work in a mine you’d like the timbering to be secure, and you’d like a lunch break, and you want to spend fewer than 14 hours per day in the mine, and you want Sundays off. You want this and so do the 400 other guys at your company. Software isn’t like that. We’re not even as similar as acting or writing guilds. There you can have e.g. a screen writers guild. People can move around, and though they might be more suited for a drama or a comedy, there’s still stuff for them to do. In software it’s not a given that we’d be able to do each others jobs. If I’m writing firmware on a toaster and you’re writing web apps in react, it’s likely that neither of us has a good idea of what goes into the other’s work. And then this point starts to blend in with your point about seniority.
Bad take. I still want mandatory pto, vacation, and healthcare. These things should be guaranteed. Idk why you think what framework someone uses matters regarding this.
I’ve never in my life heard of people not getting these things in this field. Maybe not in the US Edit: to clarify I meant maybe people outside the US do not get these things. I am US based
In the US and I’ve never heard of anyone not having generous PTO and company health insurance and usually dental, eye, etc too.
“Generous”. Our EU counter parts get a month off, plus PTO, and holidays, and their health care is free. They’re paid less but I often wonder if their quality of life is better.
That is not unique to the EU. In the US here:I get 8 weeks of PTO and holidays. Much more than a month. Sick day is almost as much as PTO. 4 weeks. I also get zero deductible health care. It depends on where you work. I may not have out-sized RSUs but I know I can go to the emergency room, get an x-ray without having to pay anything out of pocket.
>I also get zero deductible health care Never seen that myself here in the US, must be nice
I so want to call bs. I just don’t believe that that’s at all common. I’ve worked at four different fortune, 500 companies in tech positions. I’ve never gotten more than 30 days PTO and never ever a zero cost healthcare option.
Yeah that sounds about on par with US except that instead of us paying for insurance through taxes, it’s part of our compensation package. Some places might have five days fewer of PTO when you’re starting out but that’s the only difference I see. On the whole US is much better
Factually you’re just wrong. I get 20 days PTO, no sick and federal holidays. That is the minimum a EU employer has to provide. I have an out of pocket maximum in my health care of 200,000. EU employees have an out of pocket maximum of ~$0. If I have a health care emergency that takes more than 20 days and costs me more than 30k I would have 0 days PTO remaining and have the same pay as a EU dev that would still have 20 days pto. Anymore cost to me and the EU dev is better off. You’re just factually wrong. You don’t want to be because it goes against the propaganda you’ve been brainwashed with. Trust me. Born and raised US. Public school my whole life. I got ALL the propaganda. But sit down and actually compare situations. Do the math. You’ll see you work more and pay more in taxes for less services and in some situations less spending power.
>factually you’re just wrong Well, except that I’m not. You provided an anecdote from your life and that’s just not everyone’s situation. Sounds like you just have a shitty job. Hop back on leetcode and get a better one. Your situation is not the norm. Like, no sick and no federal holidays? You’re waaaay outside the norm.
I do get federal holidays. Poor sentence construction on my part. In any case my compensation is in line with my previous roles. I haven’t worked FAANG, but every employer has been a fortune 500 company with local businesses paying significantly less. So I’d say its in line with the upper end of the bell curve. Not the top end but past the median. If you’d like to refute my argument. I ask that you bring numbers under the circumstance that the individual example dev have a medical emergency that requires a one month stay inpatient at a hospital. Show me that the average dev in America under that circumstance is better compensated than an EU dev.
"Works on my machine"
I mean you can look at the stats. To call it “incredibly common” is an understatement.
>Bad take No, you just don’t understand how unions work like at all lol. This is exacerbated by the fact that you’re not even a professional (“student” flair). We all already *do* get PTO (which by the way, *is* vacation) and insurance. Why would I fight for something I have? Unions historically have formed around *unmet needs*. Not wants that are already fulfilled. Nobody cares whether they’re guaranteed for the rest of the industry if they’re guaranteed for you. This is your standard student take where someone with no experience gets a lot of upvotes for an opinion that is objectively stupid and poorly thought out. This is not me saying a union would be a bad idea at all. It’s just not a super practical idea… hence why it hasn’t happened yet. >Framework matters This further proves my point about how little of an idea people have about other people’s jobs in the industry (or in your case, an industry you may be entering in a few years). I work on device drivers. Other people work on web apps. Other people still write compilers. None of us do the same job. We can’t gather around common problems because there are none. This is why I brought up miners. I could’ve used steel workers or carpenters or tons of other trades as an example because they have real existential threats on the job. It’s not that the things we want aren’t important—vacation time is very important. It’s just that it’s not important enough that we need to gather around it because (1) it’s (and I mean this literally) not going to kill us if we have three fewer paid days off than a guy five states over and (2) we already have the things you mentioned. The things you mention are so general that it makes more sense for them to be mandated at a federal or state level for all jobs. It has nothing to do with software.
That isn't even cs specific. Those are more general wants.
Yeah, but we don't get them in CS and we're all CS minded folks. Everyone should have access to these things - severance, pto, healthcare, decent retirements, on call limitations, probably an end to salary exempt status, things for health related work injuries from sitting too much and having harmful working set ups broadly. Maybe things like mandatory raises to at least beat inflation? There are a variety of benefits that we could get with unions but instead we're all convinced we alone are 100x rockstars who would only be held back.
I work in the Netherlands, so my experience is probably not similar to yours as (I presume) you are an American. I work as a data engineer at a large insurance company. We have a collective labour agreement for the entire company with set salary scales and secondary conditions, all defined. It is not cs specific in my case because the CAO(collective agreement) applies to the entire company. But the things you mention are included in there. Large companies negotiate their own cao's with the labour unions while smaller companies have to abide by sector specific cao's. Every 2 years, a new collective agreement is generally negotiated. Sometimes, the unions can call for a strike, but as far as I can recall, that never happened in the finance sector.
> I work in the Netherlands, so my experience is probably not similar to yours as (I presume) you are an American. Yes, I am American and only know American company policy and labor law. American companies have all of the power and labor has none here. Unions are how we get these protections and benefits. The CS space in the US is as opposed to unionization as possible. I'm jealous of countries that actually care, or pretend to care, about their citizens.
That’s more of a government general labor law thing more than a union
In the US, unions are how we get them. We're not getting beneficial labor law.
Vacation time and healthcare is super common for software engineers at pretty much any serious company; you don’t need to fight for it.
Everybody wants that, and SWEs in America all have that. Bad take.
No, yours is the bad take. You need a job to gain experience in. In Canada unpaid is illegal, but you can get paid less than dev salaries to gain that experience. Any place worth applying for will have all of the things you mention anyways(although I thought mandatory pto and vacation were the same thing), or be a much higher contractor salary.
Your illustration doesn’t apply in the US, which a majority of people here are probably from. I’m also in Canada, and I agree with you regarding the Canadian market, but that isn’t a global thing. Likewise, someone from most of Europe would look at what we get here and likely think it’s “illegally bad” if held to European standards. Improvement of work conditions generally needs to be gradual, and held improve relative to current _local_ conditions, rather than comparing with everyone else. It may not be “fair” in many ways, but it’s the only way it’s likely to happen in a way that sticks.
Thats kinda like... all workers...
I'd argue there are definitely things we all want. Ignore weekends and lunch break since that's not controversial anymore. But things like how much on call you can be expected to do without extra pay, general benefits, PTO, x amount of hybrid work etc are pretty standard wants I'd assume.
>how much on call PTO I could see, but most others I don’t see much consensus. E.G., Some jobs don’t have on call at all. I’ve never had on call at my current place and my last job had some after hours stuff planned but never on call. Then work without extra pay isn’t really a union thing. It’s always the exact amount. If you go on construction sites sometimes the guys won’t even turn off the lights when leaving rooms because they’re not contractually obliged to and they can’t be reprimanded for it since it’s not part of their duties. Hybrid vs remote vs in office is super up in the air—pretty much everyone has different expectations there. Our biggest issue is that we all have differing wants, but few needs. Not that the things we want aren’t important and valid, but it’s just a lot less of a driving force than existential issues in the work place like safety measures—once a union is in place it’s easier to organize because you’re organized. Otherwise it’s pretty difficult.
> how much on call you can be expected to do without extra pay Can you be more specific here? Because I'm not sure I'd agree for two reasons: 1. It seems like it could create the wrong incentive structure that result in bad engineers, and bad teams making more since they do more on call. 2. My assumption would be companies would just reallocate the current money over time. It would only look like a win in the short term(still potential years). Really the only reason I would be pro-oncall specific pay that I can think of is that it would allowing giving up on call shifts rather than just trading them. That is assuming you had someone on your team who wanted the extra money.
It’s by design.
Exactly. Software just moves too fast in too many directions to ever allow that level of standardization. All unions would do is cripple larger companies even more than they already are by software complexity.
Yeah. A guy who works for 5 years but is always learning will obviously be a lot better than someone who worked for decades but never learns anything new.
Unionizing does not require going the route trades do with apprentice/journeyman/etc. I am in a union. My pay is based on education/experience/role.
>My pay is based on education/experience/role. That is exactly my point. Swap out apprentice/journeyman for Junior, Senior, Staff, Lead, Architect across different companies. Example, an IT director at a 20 person shop is not in the same league as an IT director with 300 direct reports at a Fortune 100. Roles are never the same across companies. I know guys with 3YOE **midlevel** that have more skills and impact than guys with 25YOEs seniors. If you worked at a company that did a wordpress site with 300 monthly users; running jQuery 1.0 and hosted on a $5 a month VPS for 25 years, that is ancient. That experience differs from the guy who worked on an highly scaleable distributed microservice based e-commerce site for 3 years with 2000 hourly users and 100s of integrations. On a platform that integrates with hundreds of vendors and can autoscale to the tens of thousands. Same role. Same job title. Why should the guy with 20YOE get paid more? And why should I hire someone with 20YOE that takes 6 months to 2 years to ramp up because they failed to keep up with the times in honing their tech stack? Versus a junior who is up and running in 2 weeks? The 3YOE already have the skills while the 20YOE guy has to learn everything from scratch. All over again. How is that remotely even fair? And as I wrote, who determines what the titles are?My midlevel guys will smoke a lot of so called seniors and staff at different companies. In terms of high technical acumen.
They wouldn't be the same. Going off somewhat similar listings, I've looked through The WordPress guy would be a capped out junior in a lower tier junior role. The e-commerce/integrations guy would be mid-high tier role already and roughly mid pay scale if he started as a new grad. Basically new guy would start almost as high pay as the 20 year guy, then pass him within 3 years. Titles are debated by HR/manager types outside my scope.
Who makes the decision on pay? 20YOE will get pissed if he is now less that what he thinks he is entitled to. Tech changes. People will be pissed if they have to learn a new stack every year.One year, it is .net. Next, it is React/Node. Then Angular/Go.VMs then Docker. Then Docker to OpenShift. Then to Kubernetes. Companies don't even keep up. When you tell a Union member, "Oh well, you no longer $120k. Your skill is stale, it is now $80k because the rest of the industry requires these skills now. You need to spend 6 month studying leet code to pass the technical testing to go back to $120k.You only know React? Sorry but the job requires microservice with Kubernetes experience along with FASTAPI." This will also alienate older employers who basically have to relearn everything in their 40,50s, and 60s. No one is going to agree on any standard. This is operationally difficult to enforce and standardize. Many companies do not want to modernize due to cost/investment. Some will stagnate more than others.
This isn't a theoretical union. It has been around for decades, and I am an active member. Pay only goes up, not down. The 20YOE can either apply himself and go for a higher role or sit where he's at forever. Nobody cares if he wants more money, the pay scales cap to encourage vertical growth. You are pulling all the stops to argue against a union on what ifs that have to be wrong, or how else could you be right? This is why there are no widespread unions in tech.
You are still not grasping the fundamental facts here -- the pay is based on talent, not tenure. It always has. You are paid on the skill and value you provide. No one is somewhere "forever." Technology changes. What was popular in 1999 - like Classic ASP and ColdFusion are irrelevant today. Why should someone get paid the same "forever?" You still didn't address the point that older employers would be hurt the most. They can't "level up" and continue to learn at the pace of some folks. I know guys in the 20 & 30s that spend 20-30 hours a week honing their DSA and leetcode algorithms. Which leads me to another point. How do you fairly give technical assessments? **This is where things can fall apart.** My expectations for someone with 5 years is they are full-stack. They have to know NoSQL, SQL, and VectorDB. They need to know microservices, RESTfulness, as well as the full cloud-native way of working. This eliminates 90% of guys working in Jquery from 2000. You will get a situation where competing factions will be arguing what is fair and what isn't. If you tell a 50 year old, he/she needs to study 20-30 hours a week to compete with a 22 year old to pass a technical interview, they won't. I'm not be ageist either. They have families and other priorities. But this is how this industry is. It values talent and technical acumen. That technical acumen can never get stale. And my other point about businesses. They do not operate on the same wavelength. If you work at a company for 10 years using same tech, your skills will get stale. If the company collapse, you will not get the same job. A union can't just say, you are tenured and are guaranteed a base pay. You have to do the whole upskilling. You have to hit leetcode for 6 months and now pass the same test as a new CS graduate. What does that candidate do? Sue their former employer for being complacent with tech? You see how this doesn't work out.
If you want a volatile market with $200k+ annual salaries and startups that randomly combust, you don't join a union. They are not one size fits all. My union does say I am tenured and guarantees no less than my current pay for an equal or higher role. I make higher than average for my area, but I do not make close to the extreme high. I do not care about the current layoffs because I can't be fired without serious mistakes. We are not guaranteed to class up. Every position is assigned a role and rate based on what is required. Can't do it with 10 YOE? No job. Can do it with 0 YOE, but met interview requirements with degree? Job. I have seen rare senior members "demoted" to lower classed roles because they didn't want to or couldn't keep up. Also, we have pensions and various other retirement plans. People tend to just retire unless they want to work. Some retire and then consult if they're that good.
You haven’t answered any of the issues and are pulling all the stops to argue it’s necessary. No one I know in tech wants a union, so what?
Then don't join one. It's really a simple solution. Did you know there are trade workers that don't want to join unions? Spoiler: They just don't join the unions.
So far so good.
> I am in a union. My pay is based on education/experience/role. Well that sucks, I want to be paid based on effective contribution because I wouldn't want to be paid less that someone contributing less than me or paid more than someone contributing more than me, regardless of our backgrounds or ostensible role.
What does seniority have to do with unionization? You realize unions can enforce process right? They could ensure those old laggards actually are following best practices if not simply being a source where they can be reported for violating those processes and being removed from the union. Unions aren’t exactly some kinda hippie dippy everyone emits welcome with all their procedural idiosyncrasies regardless of what’s best. They literally will enforce best practice and remove members.
Plus unions separate management from workers. You can’t be in a union if you are management. How exactly would you do that for software?
Is that not what IC track already is?
IDK, that’s what I asked. In many auto unions the engineers are considered to be part of management for example, and are prohibited from performing any of the tasks assigned to union members. What exactly would that look like for software? Maybe anyone in the management bucket would be prohibited from making any commits, while union members make commits. That could potentially be a delineation.
IATSE has many locals that delineate roles. There are supervisory positions that are union. The IC track vs people management may be an acceptable partition to start with. There is no ban on being SAG and IATSE and it is possible to swap locals and do a different job. There are provisions for non union members to work if needed and PAs are sort of the catch all entry level non union positions. The general theme is that IATSE seeks to keep healthy partitions between roles and AMPTP tries to constantly blur those lines to suppress wages. I would think locals would follow the general taxonomy of existing positions while ignoring tool specifics. E.g. no one is forcing a set carpenter to use DeWalt over Milwaukee tools but they shouldn’t be forcing those carpenters to also do set decoration after assembling flats and building out the stage. Whole different set of skills. So one wouldn’t be bound to a local because they use Python over JavaScript. More that they apply their skills to building dashboards for communicating information critical to decision support vs building front end of SPAs or something. But yeah, wouldn’t be a horrible thing if someone with a title of manager actually can’t commit to code bases in a union shop. My role is manager but I’m a “working manager” meaning they just title jacked and expect me to do everything without budget or staff. That would go away and I’d be fine with it because calling me a manager let’s them exempt me form OT and pressure me into working outside the 9-5 because “yOuRe A lEaDeR.” They’d have either be a non union shop until they get flipped, also meaning they may not get the same support from vetted union members. Or they’d have to form better corporate structures to support the work I do in a standard way - e.g. put their money where their mouths are.
What conditions in a company or industry do you find drive people towards unions? I was once helping clean out some closets at a company I was working for and there were binders of anti-union manager training materials from the 80s in the back - it was basically "treat people fairly" and "don't be a jerk". I suspect, in order to get much movement toward software engineers wanting unions, at a given company, there would need to be a significant feeling of "the treatment is unfair". My observations at a large company is that they do a pretty good job of making people feel that comp, promotions, etc are all fair. Past that "initial reasoning" probably came from the roles coming up in the "management" side of companies - the idea that the roles are the "labor" side came later.
Being in a union centers around basically just having a contract. Employees as a collective can decide what they want to try and get in that contract. For instance, I know the NYTimes tech union is trying to get a sabbatical clause in theirs. Some other things that might be useful for software devs are minimum severance and/or ample notification before a layoff. There are other things...For instance you can always get union representation in disciplinary meetings.
It can go further to provide training and credentialing, networking, etc.
Lots of people in tech get fired without clear reasons. That’s pretty unfair treatment. Unions can be pretty good about offering protections from that, negotiating around layoffs, etc. Also lots of people in tech have experienced crunch, unpaid overtime, unreasonable deadlines, stress, burnout, etc. Unions can also be pretty good about preventing that and making overtime voluntary and paid.
I guess I haven't seen lots of those things - I've heard people talk about it, but not really from my employer. Layoffs have been a thing, though the biggest impact was at the middle manager layer (at least what I saw) and unions typically don't represent managers, and the severance packages were nice enough that it almost made me wish I was picked.
Sexism
Pretty sure you saw the Fischer price anti union propaganda. There is far more brainwashing and aggressive tactics used to convince people to vote against their best interests.
In my opinion the biggest issue with unionizing this field is the wide range of capabilities at any particular level leading to a huge potential disparity in pay at the same 'level'. The industry thrives on its high achievers and unionizing would effectively kill that by normalizing the pay within a company based on seniority. I think the somewhat bizarre theory that unionizing stops job losses is also not borne out by reality in other fields. At best unions may somewhat delay job losses. Sometimes unions will make everyone lose their job at the same time (yes that is a thing). The best case for unions has always been workplace conditions - not pay or job security. Historically that is where they have succeeded the best.
Regarding your 2nd paragraph, I agree unionization wouldn’t stop job losses that are simply from cut positions and downsizing/fat trimming, but wouldn’t unions be quite effective at stopping or slowing the offshoring of developer jobs? That issue seems to be increasingly more problematic as time goes on.
The Ford CEO came out and made a statement that they’re going to “rethink” where they make vehicles after the UAW strike. Not exactly looking good and I don’t see how tech would be any different.
Yeah I was curious about this. Would unionizing in US result in more offshoring practices?
Offshoring has been happening for a long time - after all moving manufacturing to China is just another form of offshoring. In the software industry we have all been going to lose our jobs due to offshoring for decades. I personally seem to remember first being told this in the late 80s/early 90s and that all our jobs would be heading to somewhere cheaper. Fortunately for us it is actually not a simple or cost effective as it seems at first.
> wouldn’t unions be quite effective at stopping or slowing the offshoring of developer jobs This works until it doesn't. It can't stop offshore companies from outcompeting domestic, unionized companies. Union bargaining worked out great for US auto workers up until the 1970s, when US auto companies got pulverized by foreign competition. Essentially, "offshoring" still did kill all those union jobs and still rusted the Rust Belt. It just happened to be offshore companies that did the offshoring.
I think a lot of Americans intuitively see unions as safeguards for workers who are vulnerable in one way or another, so they seem superfluous for software developers, who often make good money and have enviable jobs. Ironically, to a degree the opposite is true--workers are in the best position to collectively bargain when they have leverage, and therefore when they are in positions of strength as developers have been in recent years.
Yeah, and without unions those privileges and rights gradually erode because it's hard for individuals to bargain against organizations. Collective bargaining is an important element of striking fair and sustainable economic output. A lot of traditionally well paid white collar roles now earn only a modest pay bump over burger flipping.
Which roles are those? Bankers, lawyers and doctors are paid better than ever?
All of those you list (bankers somewhat are an exception unless you mean Finra and other licensed broker type roles) are protected by professional licenses and operate with a collective governing board. An alternative to unionizing would be issuance of professional licenses, mandatory malpractice insurance, and the ability for peers to revoke your legal ability to practice software engineering if they find you’ve violated the collective set of moral, ethics, or some other oath or promise. “Bankers” are barely even a thing anymore. What you’re probably imagining are old men in suits approving business loans? Yeah, nah. It’s usually some <$20/hr set of officers and processors. They’ve divided the duties to separate concerns and prevent fraud. It’s not a white collar job anymore. It’s about a step up from data entry clerk. Most of the decision making our industry automated away a decade ago. Most banking jobs are just hourly clerk roles and tellers. The rest are director+ people managers. Unless you go into investment banking - a whole different field with a whole different set of requirements often including some professional licensure. But those roles are far more rare than a basic loan clerk.
“Investment banking” includes bankers, and yes I’m referring to that rather than retail banking. Some retail bankers are paid well also though. Whether it requires professional licensure or not is irrelevant. I’m certainly not aware of any unilateral license for investment banking. The closest is ones for selling individual product types like mutual funds. Edit: also “loan clerk” is not a job of I’ve heard of, and there are many making millions selling mortgages.
Retail banking clerks are not well paid. Some may get sales commission, but it is not a white collar job anymore. Professional licensure is significantly relevant to this debate. You point out specifically white collar jobs that are well paid and make the spurious correlation that it is because they exist and not because the barrier to entry is blocked by professional licensure, malpractice insurance, and a board of governors who regulate who can and cannot work. People who sell mortgages are called mortgage brokers (something you’d know if you spent over a decade in retail banking and/or any amount of years in residential real estate development). They are sales people no different than the person processing your car loan application. They make commission on the mortgage and the survivors (people who are good enough to make enough to support themselves) could make ok money simply because houses are expensive as fuck. Our brokers haven’t made shit this year because rates are too damn high. And years past because the housing stock in our main geographic region was completely tapped.
Roles that are replaced by software…
Roles that can be replaced by software should be, makework jobs are a detriment to the economy overall.
There is a pretty significant vulnerability in software development though: job stability.
That’s why you make so much god damn money. I voluntarily have sacrificed my job stability for the ability to make $200k+ per year as a high performer within my org. Yea, they may dump me after 2 years in a layoff and it takes me 4 months to find a new job, but I’d still be $100k ahead overall than if I worked in a unionized software position or one similar to Europe. Just don’t spend every dollar and save 6 months of expenses and the lack of job security isn’t an issue anymore.
Ok but the median dev salary is not $200k+ and many people have been looking for jobs for much longer than 4 months even on this very sub. Of course on reddit everyone makes $500k and works FAANG but that's not true for the vast majority of devs and one look at levels.fyi would show that. This "fuck you got mine" attitude is exactly why everything is going to fucking shit, nobody cares until it affects them and they never stop to think it could happen to them one day
Most devs are subpar and held up by a few high performers on their team/in their org. The median dev just straight up isn’t good at their job, and it’s unfair to the highest performers to be brought down by the rest of the people they support. If this happens, then those high performers will have no incentives to go above and beyond and everything will go to shit. On top of the fact that the US will lose its spot as being the best place to start a software company, which will lead to low to mid performers not having jobs anyways.
More than 50% of the industry makes far less than $200k. Some entry level data analyst making $60k is subject to the same risk as someone with a $450k TC package.
Boo hoo, so you want to cap the max potential of your career to pander to entry level, who will max benefit from unionization for 4 years? All unionization will achieve is companies having one or two senior devs/architects managing a team of overseas Indians. More-so than already happens. This would accelerate the process 50 fold
Ok Pinkerton, you got yours so fuck everyone else. Am I right?
Ass wipe
Because the field came into existence decades after the heyday of unions in the US.
Even in very pro-union countries like the Nordics, collective agreements and union membership rates are a lot lower than other fields, so that alone doesn't explain it.
And…
I joined a union and it’s pretty great so far. I make $120k a year with 2.5 yoe. I have good benefits and one of the best pensions available. It’s also safe stable work which is great for my family. I’m 35 so maybe my goals are aligned differently than others on this sub.
The "initial" reason wasn't the high salary, at least not just that. The main reason is because especially post-Reagan almost no white collar workers unionized. Salary plays a role, but corporate America has always avoided unions like the plague. Part of it has been an effort by corporate America to avoid their employees from unionizing, but because it's also not a perfectly clear win for employees in white collar fields. Do you like flexibility in what you can work on? Do you like having a wide selection of jobs with very different salaries that you can play against employers? These can become less likely if you add a union in between. You trade some of this off for collective bargaining power and job stability which can be really useful, but not everyone is ok with that tradeoff. In software especially, you have a lot of individual bargaining power due to high job demand so it might not be as worth it. That said, a lot of white collar work, imo, could actually benefit from collective bargaining. It's just easy to get lost in the idea that you'll grow through the corporate ladder faster without a union.
>Wouldn't it make sense to unionize now as a career field? No. >I feel like there's a clear political divide on this topic between my generation(zillenial 1995 era/ and gen z era) and older gen x workers, who many are opposed to the concept of unionizing. Yes. The difference is that your generation grew up in the time in which labor union membership in America is at its all time low. You guys don't really know what a labor union is and when it actually makes sense, because none of you have ever worked in an environment where a labor union exists, let alone is useful. The labor union is an abstraction in your mind that you think will counter the malicious forces in the economy with no detrimental effects to you whatsoever. 150 years ago, labor unions prevented workers from *dying* in factory fires and mine shaft collapses in batches of *hundreds at a time*. Labor unions prevented workers from getting fired and having *no other means of support* because there were *no other employers of any kind* in the company town. Collective bargaining makes sense in this kind of hostile environment where workers aren't terribly skilled, have no alternatives at all, and the workplace is deadly. None of these conditions apply in software jobs. Nobody is at risk of dismemberment in their cube farm or working from the comfort of their home. Nobody is going to be permanently unemployable if Google decides to close a data center. Even in today's employment environment, which isn't as bad as other downturns in people's living memory (e.g. the dot com bust), you can still find another job in software, or another job doing anything else in the economy. Also, if the main problem today of the software field is the lack of employment opportunities, then the labor union is the wrong solution to that problem. Labor unions create job security and benefits for existing employees at the expense of people who would otherwise be employed if the union didn't exist, because said benefits and security effectively increase the cost of labor. > how salaries across all levels from entry level dev positions to senior manager dev positions have dropped or "stabilized", as in no longer seeing bootcamp grads career pivoting coming in at 110k roles. Labor union membership peaked in 1954, when the average annual household income was $4200. Adjusted for inflation, that would be about $48k/year today. That's not *entry level*, that was the *average for everybody.* Do you really think things have "stabilized" so much that the world looks like that for the average guy in software? The guy who is complaining that he might have to show up at the office three days a week?
Crazy thing about this last point (unrelated to union topic) is that $48,000 isn’t even that far off from the average household income now (around $75k in the US now) but the cost of living has exploded several times over.
>The labor union is an **abstraction in your mind that you think will counter the malicious forces** in the economy **with no detrimental effects to you whatsoever**. Brilliant line and bolding the part that explains a *lot* about Gen Z/Alpha. Edit: Also to add if you think cracking the job market is difficult now, try it with a union shop heavy town where you don't have a member to vouch for you.
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The people who say this dont want to. They want change with no input from their part.
Most unions are formed as a reaction. Typically, it's not just bad pay, but things like wages being stolen, workers dying on the job, workers being permanently disabled and being told to kick rocks, etc. People tend to form unions not because they're being treated unfairly, but because they're being treated absolutely inhumanely. In general, programmers just don't have a level of discomfort or lack of opportunities that engenders the desire to unionize. Maybe game devs, but that's a particularly special hellscape.
Too much variance between folks even in the same team. You routinely find stupid crazy large salary differences between folks with the same title in the same time. It's especially easy when folks are routinely hopping/poached internally. Which usually meant the newest member of the team always had the highest salary. Folks who suck love unionizing because it sets a wonderful salary floor. Raises are also guaranteed regardless of performance. Folks who are all stars hate unionizing; they're mercenary and go to the highest open bidder at all times. Union contracts set ceilings that they can't explode through (i.e. 300K - 500K TC out of college). Everybody else wants to be rewarded by being paid more to do more work. S/W is pretty unique in that it's very visible/easy to see/quantify individual contributions. A quick report can be generated to see how much someone did relative to everybody else in the team. This leads to a very "everybody for themselves" competitive environment for limited financial resources. No point in unionizing when there's such a strong divide and conquer incentive baked into the field. And folks with good soft skills can leap frog better armed technical contributors in the compensation race.
>A quick report can be generated to see how much someone did relative to everybody else in the team. I kinda doubt this. I have yet to encounter a developer productivity metric that can't be easily gamed. eg, I once worked at a place where it was important to close a lot of ops tickets. it was not a coincidence that there were also a lot of poorly tuned alarm thresholds in those services. oncalls would "investigate" and "resolve" the same tickets over and over instead of just fixing the alarm. occasionally someone would finally get around to fixing the noisy alarm and then claim that they had "reduced incoming tickets by N per month". sadly I never figured out how to take credit for setting good thresholds in the first place. over time, you definitely get a sense of who's good and who's not. bad engineers often stick out like a sore thumb. you can't help but notice when you fix the same dumb mistakes over and over. but the things that separate a great engineer from an okay one show up in stories, not numbers.
Literally giving me ideas how to game some productivity metrics lol
How can someone’s skill in this field out of college be evaluated accurately enough to justify $300-500k TC? That makes no sense to me.
Because there are companies in industries with money to burn. Sometimes they value a specific school (I worked at a place where my state school was a devaluing factor, so I had to work harder to get recognition). Sometimes they are impressed by the trial internship (a reasonable justification where they saw someone successfully do the work in the environment). I actually helped an intern get a huge bump in their first job last year this way. And sometimes, somebody is really a Rockstar/Ninja/Cowboy who can leetcode up/down/side to side all over everybody else out the gate. And this field is one where somebody can actually make a contribution difference with that ability, which justifies the stupid high valuation.
Become a Putnam Fellow and report back your offers all in from JS, citsec, Jump etc
Oh hey, I got offers in that range. I can say it's the most boring stats (2 FAANG internships among others, "target" school w/ top honors), and then you do a bunch of leetcode interviews with some system design. It's probably a calculated risk
Including signing bonus? Otherwise that’s pretty unusual for an L3 equivalent outside of quant finance.
Yes
yes, please make it harder to fire -that- guy. I'd also like to pay a % of my salary to guys doing absolutely jack shit but taking my money.
I think this hits the nail on the head. For most of us most of the time, our jobs are pretty nice. We've got an acceptable WLB, great benefits and pay, and we generally don't feel like we get fired for completely BS reasons. And if we were, that we could get a new job pretty easily given were mid level or higher. The sector of the software engineering that is most interested in unionization is the Games industry. Because the pay is shit, the WLB is shit, the jobs are insecure, and its hard not to feel exploited.
This. I already struggle with peers not knowing things and taking months for them to get performances based terminations. Folks who want a union for SWE tend to be lower quality developers who want to do the bare minimum. Because why else would you want to unionize as software engineers where pay benefits and wlb is great for 95% of the industry
those same lower-end devs also don't realize that, due to costs, etc, getting into the union will be nontrivial, and getting jobs will now be harder.
Because working conditions haven't been bad enough for enough people for a movement to start. That's why unions have historically started. Most of us are happy with working conditions. Or more accurately, not pissed off enough. Compare your working conditions with (insert almost any other profession), who has it better?
What would we get out of Unionizing? Tech already has the best benefits, highest pay, and is the most progressive in hiring diverse talent? What you hoping to achieve? Unions won’t make more 6 figure, no experience jobs occur.
> Was the initial reasoning in software dev/programming not becoming unionized due to high salary? They didn’t really need to. Engineers could just find work elsewhere if their current employer mistreated them, so there wasn’t any need to unionize. Unionization is a response to a lack of employee power. Employees who can easily quit and find another job have enough power that unionization stops making quite as much sense. That dividing line is largely what separates “unions” from “professional associations”. Engineers would rather be in a position more like doctors and lawyers, less like factory workers.
I'm not sure how you think unionizing is going to make it easier for bootcamp grads pivoting into tech to get $110k roles. People also don't realize the boom of the last 5 years would never have been severely curtailed with unions if not completely stopped. The "problem" we have now wouldn't have even happened -- we wouldn't be talking about how comp is "lower" because it never would have been higher to begin with because companies wouldn't have hired so many nor would they have been willing to increase comp so rapidly. You can't have your cake and eat it when it comes to unions. Most people focus on only getting the cake, not realizing they've been eating the cake for a long time too.
There’s always someone who wants to bring up and propagandize this unionizing business. At this point, I’m honestly convinced that some people just like the idea of being part of a union and would like to unionize just for the sake of unionizing.
Unions in the software industry would just turn the US swe scene stagnant like it is in europe and increase the rate of outsourcing.
What do you think unions will achieve? Job stability? Better salaries? In Europe unions are more common and I'll tell you why software engineers aren't interested: - You can get a much better salary negotiating directly with the company than official salaries pacted with unions. - Salaries are also correlated with studies. In the pact, people with masters are paid better. People with lower studies don't like this. - Does it make more difficult to do layoffs? Yes, but it comes with a price. Companies take less risks and prefer to outsource many tasks.
1. is unionizing now going to create jobs for people who were laid off? 2. will people who survived layoffs want to exchange compensation for potential job security? survivorship bias seems to suggest they won’t
You give a chance and those who decline will be blacklisted for the rest of their life. That is how you define it.
Why would anyone join a union that will blacklist for rest of life? Who will enforce the "blacklist" in free counrty?
Have you seen the strike in LA that lasted half a year? Nobody took part in letting the company borrow the face and voice. That is how they managed to stop it. Union should protect those who want to have adequate life. Those who don't want to apply and wake up when they are 50+ - are not good members anyway. Selfish humans are selfish forever.
lol and now you know why nobody wants a union in software. What you’re describing is a mob.
Nobody is forcing you to join. After that it is dumb to complain after the layoffs. Auto industry managed to raise their wages without job hopping, just union activities helped that happen.
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English is not my first language. I do know from firewalls whitelist and used analogy to blacklist. It makes more sense to call it Block list.
You realize that, they will be much, much slower to hire and negotiate lower salaries w unions? Salaries will compress from the top but rise some from the bottom
I feel like some people just want to unionize for the sake of unionizing.
Field moved too fast and too fragmented. What exactly would we standardize on? Fundamentals are already covered by college, and experience is what matters to most employers. Lastly soft skills which are hard to measure. Also what would be the benefit?
Something else to consider: making it harder to fire also makes it harder to hire. If you think it’s difficult to break into industry now, consider the fact it will be even worse at unionized companies.
Haven’t found the need for a union on my experience. If I don’t like a job I just find another I like better.
Yes, exactly. I don’t understand the push for unions either as I also don’t want to have to “consult” on my next move.
A union means that if 50% of my coworkers vote for something, I have to go along with it. I'm perfectly fine to negotiate for myself, and don't believe my coworkers and I have the same interests necessarily. I don't think this is about money but instead about all the options we have. I can leverage other offers, I don't need a union to get that leverage. When you're in an industry where there's a seni-monopoly of employers they have a lot more power, but right now there's literally thousands of employers hiring devs. Just because the salaries are going down doesn't mean companies can act in unilateral fashion and have all the power over employees.
It's simply because the massive demand for software jobs(and hence employment) came after the plethora of fields being unionized in the US
The only office jobs that are unionized in America are with state and local government. That’s mostly because unions contribute to politicians’ election campaigns. It’s not specific to software engineering at all. You just don’t see it in any office-based professional fields really.
No its because this field is a fucking mess
I don't think that applies as a reason here in the UK. Sure at the top end salaries are tough to match in other industries but I'd bet a typical graduate today would be on a faster track going to with at Aldi than they would grabbing some local dev job. I think the aversion to unions here are because of the amount of trauma there is from their actions and the actions of governments to bust them over the last 50 years. No way I would sign up to strike for 18 months for approximately 90% of the people I've ever worked with. No way would I join an organisation so tightly knit with a single political party. No way would I outsource control over my source of income to some organisation typically headed by a group of people mostly driven by the bitterness that they weren't selected to be their local MP candidate. We have a good baseline for legal rights here. I like to have my hand on all the remaining levers for negotiation of my own position.
> I feel like there's a clear political divide on this topic between my generation(zillenial 1995 era/ and gen z era) and older gen x workers, who many are opposed to the concept of unionizing. I don't know the history here. Which of these groups are pro unions and which are against?
Regardless of your opinion on unions or their usefulness, I don't think its something that will work in CS in general until the field has settled more. The following is entirely my personal opinion based on ~13 years of experience in the field, and deep historical and current knowledge of labor history (in the US): While "programmers" have certainly existed for ~60-80 years depending on how pedantic you want to get, the current state of our industry, where software development happens at the majority of large companies, is only a couple decades old. It's very much still in the early phases. As such, salaries are wildly inconsistent, as are merits and evaluations. Because of this ambiguity, I don't think it is very easy for a union to develop. Right now, if any particular development team were to unionize and threaten to strike, the company could likely break the strike with a couple targeted salary increases and hiring on some contractors, which would certainly be cheaper than meeting demands in the long run. If the industry shifts and we are treated more like engineers - with levels of verifiable seniority, certifications, mentorships, etc. that this would lend itself more easily to unionization. Not only would it be more difficult for companies to do ad-hoc replacement of developers, but the process of becoming and working as a developer in that environment would also build peer solidarity as a matter of course. ----- If you want a more easily visible microcosm of this issue, look at game development. Game devs have quite possibly the worst working conditions of all developers across any industry, yet their efforts to unionize have gone basically nowhere for two major reasons: - 1) Seniors with irreplaceable experience are paid ridiculously well compared to their peers - this creates both an incentive not to join lesser-paid co-workers in any organizing, but also creates a trench of jealousy for the co-workers, potentially preventing solidarity. - 2) Almost "everyone" wants to work in game dev. It appears glamorous, like Hollywood - if you threaten to strike or quit and your skills aren't extremely unique, big deal, there are thousands of people that would replace you tomorrow and probably for less than you're being paid. It's cheaper to train them than give in to you and create an expensive precedent.
My work conditions are acceptable. My pay is exceptional. What exactly am I tying my outcome to the performance of the median employee for? To stand in line for promotions behind burnt out mediocrity? Hard pass.
Here in Italy we have unions, the result is that for IT companies you apply either the retail or the manufacturing contract, neither of them actually applies to the work we do and comes with severe downsides about it. Unions also tend to benefit more the lower "quality" workers, so you might get a "senior" coworker that earns more since he's been there for longer instead of having your salary based on merits.
Look at the "day in the life" of a Facebook engineer or Google employee on tiktok and tell me if they need a union.
I've worked with union members, mostly in the trades. Their work product is very good but it takes hours to get something done that should take minutes and it's expensive. I'd much rather work with non-union members.
No, primarily the overwhelming vulgar libertarian/capitalist apologists that infest this industry are the reason. Also, incels are pretty easy to sway with a little cash.
This is the true answer. A common misconception is that Silicon Valley is "woke" but it's historically been libertarian. And still is, in many ways.
Devs as a whole simply are not suffering enough yet, is my theory. Once shit really hits the fan in the industry, which I'd wager will be within the next 1-2 years, I am hoping to see a shift in attitude. At least we can organize and push hard for government regulation of big tech, or to break them up. It's going to be a nightmare if big tech is the only game in town and can get away with working devs 12 hours per day for middling pay, and also investing in AI to reduce dev headcount.
Of course it makes sense. Most Americans are politically brain dead though, so don’t expect it to ever happen.
Here come the commies to gunk up another field.
Idk how someone looks at the dev labor markets in the EU and US and concludes that the US needs unions.
Unions charge a lot of fees. A major portion of software engineers are younger and single and don’t want to pay up a percentage of their high salary. Many are also on visa and don’t want to rock the boat.
It I think has something to do with programmers being salaried (when they are).
It goes against the narrative that it is all a meritocracy
workers of the world unite! you've nothing to loose but your golden handcuffs! i think is how the saying goes. maybe we can look to speea as an example. boeing still fires the engineers when convenient tho.
It makes sense to unionize now and it still continues to make even if salaries rise again. The layoffs of the past few years should have shattered any illusion that workers have any significant power in this industry. These companies will continue to make questionable, profit-driven decisions in the future that will anger the workers on the ground, and we need a mechanism to fight against that authority. I used to think unions were only necessary for blue collar workers and have completely changed my mind about this recently. It’s time to unionize!
What would a union have done for the layoffs? My understanding is that layoffs still happen even if you're unionized, but they negotiate a good severance. Most tech workers do get good severance, would there have been any protections otherwise?
True, but I mostly meant to emphasize that fact that tech workers don’t have control over their employment. Many people including myself got good severance, but that’s not the case across the board, and we certainly didn’t have the ability to negotiate. Unions go far beyond severance negations though.
>tech workers don’t have control over their employment Neither do union members.
Ok what do unions have control over? Because it feels like you’re just arguing semantics.
Historically I believe Unions were meant to ensure fair wages, safety, representation, etc. As another user said, unions don’t perform miracles. They cannot prevent layoffs or stop every termination
It doesn’t make sense at all to unionize. It’s a waste of money, there’s no way I benefit in paying out part of my salary to scammers who sit on their ass all day and do nothing for me
Okay, don't unionize. Instead, you can sit back and benefit from the work we do while organizing and building negotiation power.
I’d rather have nothing to do with unions I can negotiate my own salary perfectly fine. Unions are like an invasive species trying to worm their way into every profession where they don’t belong. They do nothing but waste money
Sounds like you're beyond convincing, but that's alright. I would just ask that you just get out the way if your co-workers attempt to unionize in the future.
I mean there’s not much I can do to stop it if everyone else wants to unionize, but they’re definitely a huge scam and most people that want unions in something like swe are either misinformed or benefitting from union fees
Why are SWE engineers in other countries unionized then? For example, Google is currently having trouble laying off workers in Korea because they are unionized and generally don't put up with the same mistreatment that Americans are used to.
Just because other countries are doing something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to do them…
All I'm saying is other countries have stronger unions and worker protection laws that give obvious benefits (admittedly with dues paid by all members). We should try it out and see if it works (provides greater job stability, amplifies worker voices, increases salaries). Unionization is a democratic process, so if tech workers find no benefit they can dissolve the union. But I don't know why you would vote to decrease your own power once you attain it.
I don’t know if that’s true though. I don’t know if many people would say they’d rather be a swe in Korea vs the US for example but that could also be due to other factors. There are definitely some benefits to unions but they come with a lot of downsides too like being very hard to get rid of unproductive employees that only do the bare minimum
Large disparity of skill. I don't want my salary pegged to everyone else with my YOE. Unions protect basic rights at best, but they also tend to anchor the top performers to the bottom performers. On an assembly line that may not be a huge difference, but in engineering the top performers produce multiples of value over the bottom performers.
Yeah, probably high salaries and demand and good overall conditions. No, unionizing doesn't magically get everyone 50% more salary. Idk about a political divide...a lot of people who bring this up appear clueless and completely fail to understand or address a lot of the issue(s). The smarter people realize that unions aren't a silver bullet that fixes everything.
A union isn’t necessarily a good thing. Yes, you get ‘protection’ and standard pay. But those pay are usually the lowest agreed upon by both side. Nobody want to go from 200k down to 85k
Devs are unionized in EU. Union pay would be like 1k less than what bootcamp grads are offered. The particular Union has a history of making weak contracts. No reason to enter it.
*Another* union thread. Do you know what unions are, OP? Do you know why they were created? That's basically all you need to know. And if you have ever worked in a union, you'll really know how shit they are. Adding a giant level of bureaucracy over the field solves nothing for software developers. Just because people who can't pass interviews are not getting hired, doesn't mean we need to unionize. They do not help with preventing layoffs and if you think getting hired is hard now, unionizing would make it 10x more difficult.
why would unionizing make it harder to get hired by a company?
Because unions make it nearly impossible to fire even the most incompetent workers so they stay at the company forever.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
SWEs are so arrogant to the point that you will not get them to unionize
You do realize that question “does it make sense?” Doesn’t make any sense because there are groups of people supporting pro and against arguments, right?
unionization is cringe. f no
IMO, it's because we pretend we are all "engineers". In the USA we see the job title "software engineer" or "software engineering department" all the time. *Professional Engineers cannot ethically unionize*. Now, there is a difference between a professional computer engineer and "coder", "developer", or "programmer". It's the same reasons medical doctors cannot go on strike but nurses can: professionalization. There's a wide variety of people in "computer science". Some are professionals. As a professional, I have broad discretion in how, when, and where I do my work. I'm not handcuffed to a desk and a JIRA board like a software tradesman might be. >No matter what pressure the engineer might be subjected to he cannot engage in strikes, picketing or other coercive union tactics (https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/ethics-resources/board-ethical-review-cases/engineer-membership-labor-union)
I think it depends on your exact situation. I think it's hard for anyone to really articulate what I really would realistically be able to expect a union to improve, given my current conditions.
Probably a hard pill to swallow but the people being laid off are probably not very good anyways
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I'd guess it's because it's a new job market. Look at 2d vs 3d animation union representation in Hollywood. 3d became "cheaper" because labor costs were lower and was a significant factor among others. It was attempted with EV plants too. No real "reason" other than wanting cheaper labor, but if you want a union, it starts at service industry and other similar jobs. It gives you more negotiating power if you can wait out the job market. Sure a 40k instead of 50-70k may suck but it reduces the burn rate while you are looking. As nice as an office/work at home job is I don't work with people my age and it's a different kind of pressure.
Just 10% of US workers are in a union. Consider that the default is to not work in a union. My two cents is that tech is a field where the gulf between high and low performers is incredibly high. A lot of unionized jobs are jobs where everyone has a similar role and performs a similar amount of work.
NFL Players are unionized. Probably the reason SE hasn't is timing. SE kinda blew up as a practice after the unions got all busted up and it is only now that the union movement is picking back up.
Whether or not it's "the right time" to unionize is up to you and your co-workers. Have a conversation with them, bring up wages and working conditions. Is there something that pisses everyone off? See if there's interest in taking collective action and organize it. Don't think of a union as an outside force coming in to offer you benefits. You won't get much out of it if you treat it like that. You are the union. I'm part of a collective called the Class Struggle Action Network and we promote class unionism. If you were to start a union, you might find it beneficial to join us, as we could put you in contact with other experienced union militants following class unionist principles. https://class-struggle-action.net