Consider a few ways engineers could have things Even Better:
Less / No crunch time. Ethical support so you can refuse to do something shady. Support for union members getting equal pay and equal treatment, despite marginalized status. Job security for people over 50.
Those are just off the top of my head. And yes, I get that not all of those things are delivered by all unions. But ultimately, there is a lot to be gained from banding together and cooperating, which cannot be negotiated singly.
I think a lot of the HN crowd has enough experience and clout to keep from getting exploited, but I'd personally love to be a part of a large union where I can help mentor junior engineers and get help in turn from more senior ones.
I think beyond shared negotiation, what a union could really help with is managing younger engineers' careers. I stuck around in a bad first job way too long because I just didn't have enough experience or exposure to successful engineers to realize how crappy my job really was.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm confident that well-organized engineers working together could very substantially grow the percentage of company revenues that go to engineers, which would benefit both upper and lower tier performers by growing the pie. As for the way workers might punitively divide up that larger pie, it sounds like knucklesandwhich is more knowledgeable than me about craft unions and the ways they try to mitigate against that. Presumably high-performing engineers would be a powerful bloc within such an organizing effort/union, and could advocate effectively for their interests.
I don't have any specific limitations in mind, but I'd review the idea to see what problems the union is intended to resolve. Unions originally existed to resolve exploitation by manufacturing companies. Is the group of engineers you are considering unionizing being exploited?
It is, but engineers are compensated at (relatively) crazy levels , so different incentives will need to be given for them to organize. Sometimes social change occurs over the most trivial of issues- certainly wars have been fought over less.
And again, what’s the solution to a problem that management almost universally ignores, while workers mostly detest, if applying organized labor pressure isn’t feasible? To wait for management to change their minds? To invent cheap real estate where each engineer can be granted their own office? To fight for remote work- so another industry standard that would also involve either mgmt. fads to change or workers to collectively protest?
A union could also put an end to crunch time, a union could ensure better pay (or pay at all, to hear some salaried people talk about it) for on-call time, a union could protect politically unpopular people from arbitrary firing (i.e. they could be fired, but it would have to follow a process), a union could give workers a seat on the board (codetermination, as it's called), a union could establish a slimmer pay gap between workers and management/shareholders.
A union does not mean: pay/rank based solely on seniority, that you can't plug in your own equipment on your desk, that do-nothing people stick around forever. These are a few of the popular disparagements of unions that are not a built-in function of a unionized workplace.
I would agree there is room for improvement with regards to the disparity you mentioned, but also that without a union, you get the current socioeconomic situation: a total lack of labor power where you are at the mercy of a corporation’s whims, which is no way to go through life. Work should not be constant grueling or suffering. Maybe it should be more cozy.
High level, there’s room to improve where workers have a decent work experience and investors still see some benefit (even if it’s less than they would like to maximize for). These are not binary decisions.
That's one possible union architecture, sure, but you're missing the forest for the trees. A union offers job security to reduce the risk of "managing up."
A more interesting conclusion could have been that engineers should use their power to walk away to instead organize together and demand better from their employers.
If you don't mind me sharing my opinion. I think that a union is just an entity that represents the workers. And not all unions of all trades have to work the same way. I think we should encourage entrepreneurship. But I also don't want the entire industry to keep on disregarding and overhiring (I see it as gambling on the economy with people) and then mass layoff workers. I'm not the best if tasked with such a question, I just do coding, I feel there must be a middle ground, and that's why I'm here :D What makes you less optimistic about it?
SWEs are overcompensated? How do you figure? The revenue figures per-engineer tell the exact opposite story.
> the leadership of a sector-wide labor union) to push against all of us would be only too handy for them; negotiations would have nowhere to go but down.
I literally cannot follow this train of thought—surely, having a single collective negotiator is the only way to prevent this exact scenario.
Regardless, you seem to be conflating regular unions with trade unions. They're different, they serve different roles—arguably, I think we need trade unions far more than regular ones if we want to do anything useful as a country in the next few decades—but in all situations having a single-negotiator is the only way to stop engineers from being pitted against each other.
I think that increasing efforts to unionize or blackball projects will just increase off-shoring. This isn't like a coal mine where physicality is important and can be leveraged. It is easy to open an office in random company and also pay people less. I'm not making a judgment that it isn't important to stand up to companies being evil but I just don't see unions being successful. Most big companies could cut 50% staff on the engineering side and simply make more money. A lot of this is hoarding of resources and using it to create new products to enable more consolidation.
In this regard, I often think this is where a union or guild or something along those lines would be helpful. I've studied labor history extensively so I'm familiar with all of the downsides to a union. Some sort of collectivisation is needed to have support and collective input in cases such as this. The ones building it should have a voice.
A single engineer putting their foot down is brave, but thousands putting their collective feet down can change the world.
You are quick to point out how you don't want a union, but what you are describing are pretty much the first steps to creating a union. Most are born out of the desire to provide financial and emotional support to those within your industry.
That's not to say that they are always all sunshine and lollipops, but I guess it's too difficult for some people to accept that unions can actually also be a positive thing too.
Less / No crunch time. Ethical support so you can refuse to do something shady. Support for union members getting equal pay and equal treatment, despite marginalized status. Job security for people over 50.
Those are just off the top of my head. And yes, I get that not all of those things are delivered by all unions. But ultimately, there is a lot to be gained from banding together and cooperating, which cannot be negotiated singly.
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