If they ever did decide to hire union workers for whatever reason it would just be another layer of bureaucracy killing the company and stressing out employees.
Personal anecdata: every company I've worked at would have been worse off (and worse to work at) if the developers had been unionized.
I've also avoided working anywhere that thinks you can only be professional if you're wearing a button down shirt and / or a tie, so I don't doubt that some places might benefit.
Edit: to be clear, I've never advocated for a union, and I doubt I ever will so long as I am fortunate enough to choose my employer, rather than the other way around. This is why, I am guessing, so many tech workers don't bother attempting to unionize.
Now, admittedly I'm a skeptic of unions by default (in my view they're mostly just another layer of bureaucracy/waste), but isn't unionization of tech workers in the US the quickest way to make themselves even less desirable?
Why hire a US union member when you can hire an Eastern European who both works for peanuts and doesn't have union hang-ups? (Admittedly outsourcing has its own problems, especially when there are language/cultural barriers)
This seems like an all or nothing type of thing. I for one would never join a union so if some tech workers started to unionize I would always be available to take their place for the right price. It seems like incomplete attempts to unionize our industry will benefit those that don't want to unionize the most by making them more attractive employees.
There is no proof that unions actually contribute to the common welfare for a labor force such as tech. In fact, it's the opposite. Silicon Valley has been doing so well and enriched so many people that everyone else believes that tech workers have changed cities such as San Francisco for the worse. This was accomplished without a single union in Silicon Valley. It doesn't exist and yet hundreds of thousands of employees around here are disproportionately better off than everyone else.
Can you please explain how unions would make things better? Would we be making even more money? Or would they simply enrich themselves from union dues and create friction in every single process that makes this area great?
If a tech company I worked for unionized, I would leave. I’m not in a single company town where everyone has worked at the same place their entire lives. Tech companies face fierce competition for talent, and it has worked out quite nicely for the employees.
I wouldn’t want some outside organization coming in and forcing me to pay dues, demanding changes to the structure of the company, devaluing my equity, and making it impossible to fire poor performers that make my job harder.
I know it's an unpopular opinion around here, but it's worth considering if forming tech unions could help. Tech companies are making huge profits per employee but holding wages down.
We can build unions based on our democratic interests - what do we care about? Salary, benefits, paid oncall, IP restrictions, open source, etc.
We don't have to sign up with one of the giant calcified corrupt US unions, there are plenty of shops out there that are more modern and give local groups much more autonomy.
Oh not this deceased equine again. Is /r/sysadmin leaking?
>gosh what the tech industry could accomplish with a union
Much less than it does now.
I've had odd jobs at union places. I know career workers in union-dominated industries.
We don't want it within 10 miles of tech.
A fun thought experiment I ask people to do that usually puts this one to bed:
Imagine the most useless, technically incompetent, lazy sack of flesh that you were unfortunate enough to share the title of "engineer" with(and office space too).
In a union, they'd be very nearly impossible to fire, and based on tenure would probably make more than most of their peers.
Multiply ^^ said scenario over multiple tech companies and a few thousand workers, and see what happens.
Unions can make sense for certain industries, namely factory work. Where it's hard to own the means of production, and workers are largely uniform in output, low pay and don't have much leverage.
Unions don't make sense in tech because everyone owns the means of production (a computer) and have widely different levels of output. 10x engineers are a thing. Plus tech workers have high leverage, high pay (top 5%? 1%?), can easily get a new job, or can start their own tech company by themselves with their laptop.
Trying to enforce a union structure in tech is counterproductive, extractive and entirely unnecessary.
I think a tech union would significantly raise the wages of technical people. A past job, I automated away jobs at $0.10 on the dollar and made a healthy salary, but it obviously was 1/10th of what I was worth. I left that company and all those jobs are still automated away and the more the company grows, the more they save.
Also a tech union could push for perks like developer offices, remote work, better work equipment, etc. If nothing else, they could communicate with the business on how to make developers happy and comfortable; something the business might be willing to do, but don't know how to do.
Now is the time to do it too, US businesses are pulling back on offshore labor and bringing work back to the US.
Tech workers don't own the code they write for their employer, or the infrastructure they maintain for ops. Tech workers don't receive a share of profits that result from the value they create for the company. Tech workers don't have complete control of their schedules.
I'll grant that working in tech often means more control and flexibility than other professions, and the pay is usually decent. But at the end of the day, tech workers are creating value for their bosses, and the bosses are the ones who benefit and tell the workers what to do. A unionized workforce would tip the balance a little more in favor of workers (and a worker-owned cooperative would flip the script entirely). A strong union ran by the rank-and-file would be awesome for tech workers.
I don't know that it couldn't happen - but when an individual tech worker is making a decision about unionizing (in the US), it is always around an individual workplace unionizing. Industry-wide unions aren't very standard in the US (outside of industries with extremely high barriers to entry) and it seems like it would be extremely expensive/time-consuming to make it happen (beyond what I as an individual considering unionizing can realistically do).
Given tech working conditions are pretty nice, tech unions would likely quickly devolve into some DEI and politics catchall worse than current HR stuff, and I can't imagine many of us would want to work in union shops.
Can you imagine the bargaining power that tech workers would have if they unionized? Our industry relies on tech workers for training and hiring, so hiring scabs during a strike would be basically impossible.
Unions only have power when they are the majority in an organization and can do collective bargaining. There is simply zero utility to be had from that in tech industries as these folk are already paid too much and can walk elsewhere for opportunities.
Things like this would be much easier to accomplish if tech workers unionized. We don't necessarily need it for compensation, although many could benefit, but having a say in what we build is incredibly important.
The tech industry would just hire abroad more.
If they ever did decide to hire union workers for whatever reason it would just be another layer of bureaucracy killing the company and stressing out employees.
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