It will be interesting to see what this does for developer salaries at Kickstarter. If, as a top performer, I get penalized by joining the union then obviously Kickstarter looks less attractive to me. For unions in our industry to work they are going to have to be very explicit about how they are going to raise developer salaries.
1. I do my best work when my colleagues are also doing their best work. It doesn't matter how good I am at my job if I can't use the leverage of having teammates. I will be happier if the company can compensate all of my coworkers well and make them happy and hire good coworkers - both in terms of intrinsic motivation / happiness and in terms of whether the company is profitable enough to compensate me as my performance deserves.
2. I'm a lot better at doing the work than negotiating for the salary I deserve. There are plenty of people in this industry who are the other way around.
You do best when your colleagues do the best, for sure. Do you think the union is going to help or hurt when you have underperforming or disruptive colleagues?
There's a wide spectrum in "a union" just like in "management". I've had good management and bad management. There are good unions and bad unions. So, a priori, I don't have an expectation of whether "the union" - some arbitrarily picked union - will definitely help or hurt, any more than I have an expectation that arbitrary "management" will definitely help or hurt. But there are a few things:
- Just like I evaluate management when finding a new job (in my most recent job hunt I quite explicitly asked my interviewers what they thought about their management and how they thought it differed from other places they've worked, and hearing poor answers from one famous company was a reason I turned them down), I can evaluate the union when finding a new job. If I don't think the union will force management to deal with brilliant assholes, or properly equip people for success who have aptitude but the wrong background, or acknowledge that poor management is the reason certain of my colleagues are underperforming, I won't join the company.
- I have much more of a democratic voice in my union's priorities than my management's priorities.
- Management often prioritizes their own needs as individual employees, and is willing to overlook failures or mistakes if it's in the interest of their own career paths. It's hard to crack down on people failing up into management if you yourself are a manager because you failed up.
> If I don't think the union will force management to deal with brilliant assholes, or properly equip people for success who have aptitude but the wrong background, or acknowledge that poor management is the reason certain of my colleagues are underperforming, I won't join the company.
The issue is not that the management will defends the bad employee, it's that the union will.
How can you know if the union will?
I got a friend that right now have to deal (ask re-do the work of someone else constantly) because they can't fire her because the union don't want to do anything about it. How could she have known that the union would be ready to not protect one of their member?
The same way you learn if a job has bad management when considering taking a job there - reputation, sites like Glassdoor, asking friends in the industry, etc. This problem doesn't seem unique to unions, nor does it seem that not having unions solves it. Management can still refuse to fire a bad employee in a non-unionzed shop. I've seen it countless times.
> I have much more of a democratic voice in my union's priorities than my management's priorities.
In my experience, the best ideas compete easily to change management priorities. I prefer that system over a straight democracy for changing management priorities.
"The best ideas" is a pretty unclear phrase. The ideas that make the individual lives of managers the best will win. That's usually strongly correlated with profit for the company (on purpose, using mechanisms like stock grants). Depending on how things are structured, it may or may not be correlated with long-term profit for the company. And it's very likely to be poorly correlated with long-term happiness of workers. As a worker, an idea that increases my long-term happiness is "better" than one that increases the company's profitability. But that same idea is unlikely to appear "best" from management's point of view. You can quantify the cost to the company (and thus to the personal payout of management) from giving all workers a raise of X% or an office with a door instead instead of an open-plan desk or increased PTO or whatever, and it's harder to quantify the benefit to profitability.
But in the end, the "best" ideas in the sense of the most profitable ones will still win, because companies with truly bad ideas from populism (e.g., "empty the company's cash reserves into end-of-year bonuses") will just not survive. Unions don't change the fact that companies themselves participate in a market.
And if you prefer that system, you and others who agree with you can absolutely participate in the market too and compete as part of your own business. You can choose not to join unionized companies. But I don't prefer that system. That's all.
>In my experience, the best ideas compete easily to change management priorities.
I don't want to deny you your experiences, but this has not been mine. Not by a long-shot. Tons of time and effort get spent at my company trying to work around the idiosyncrasies of our capricious and out of touch management. And we're in a fast growing industry and our management seems to become more out-of-touch about the state of the technology and the market every year.
Their cognitive biases, pickled in their experiences from 8-10 years ago when they were last in touch with the real work, have a much bigger role in their priorities than any rational or dispassionate evaluation of what the "best ideas" are. The one saving grace they have is hiring subordinates who are good at manipulating them for their own benefit. Very VERY few tech companies can find that many people with the necessary soft skills to do it.
> I've had good management and bad management. There are good unions and bad unions.
One downside of this is it sounds like we get to roll the "good bureaucracy / bad bureaucracy" dice twice instead of once, if either roll comes up "bad" we're in trouble.
I don't think that's quite right: the idea is that a good union can insulate you from bad management. So you're using a different dice roll, but it's just one roll. (It is true that things are strictly worse under good management + a bad union than under good management + no union.)
Also, you usually have more influence in what your union does than what your management does. If I have to pick one of two dice to roll, I'll pick the one that's weighted in my favor, even if it sometimes comes up 1.
Union will help. Unions usually have probationary times before they start representing a new employee. For a year of probationary time, it's plenty to know if the employee is a good fit. If not, the employee can be let go and doesn't get the help of the union.
And union is by the employees, for the employees. If the person is truly disruptive and slipped through the 1 year mark, unions don't just back you up regardless.
In my second hand experience (friends and family, IBEW and automotive workers) this is not at all the case. Admittedly, second hand information and only two locals, but the amount of incompetence and ineptitude that they tell me about is astounding.
I think the problem gets out of hand when the represented employees become too large. If you have a nationalized union for many types of professions all under one umbrella, I can see your issue. There are those cases today as we speak. But if you have a focused union for a specific profession in a specific region, it can be easily managed and be a representative.
For example, a national union of software engineers would not be a great idea. (Even with local branches) Too many factors to consider to come to agreement. I guess a lot more sacrifice on the employees part nationally when mou negotiations are happening.
But if you have a California union for software engineers who are in a media industry, you have really focused the goals to a set of people. They can negotiate by looking at a union formed by google employees. Same thing with google. Vice versa, Just a union for google employees. They negotiate on their own or look at the benefits of a union provided by, say, Facebook.
Regarding disruptive employees: Why would a union restrict a company's ability to fire disruptive employees? (excepting the corrupted union that has irrational favorites)
Regarding under-performing employees: Are you talking about the person who is just a bit slower than others or the person who's lack of aptitude causes other employees to lose unreasonable amounts of time to assisting that employee? I'd count the second type in the same class as being disruptive.
Also, at your current workplace is everyone equal in terms salary when when normalized by performance? Is it a problem if you're a bit more efficient than a co-worker and earning the same salary as them?
Salaries aren't the only thing unions are good for. I'd be very interested in a job that had cast-iron guarantees about working hours, on-duty overtime, no open offices, stuff like that.
Why can you not ask for those things directly for the company you want to work for? I’m not getting my office? no thank you. I have to be on page duty in the middle of the night? No thank you. There are companies that offer all those maybe you sacrifice salary a bit. Someone has to pay the cost, I don’t think unions magically can give you the same salary or more at the same time you getting everything you wish for above. And if they do promise that maybe at best it’s their marketing PR and at worst look what communism did in Russia.
As someone who has pushed back against on-call overreach, all it achieved was a negative remark on my next performance review. The company attempted to make an "intermediate-severity" class of incident, where on-call workers were required to respond between the hours of 8 am and midnight (the next-lowest severity required response only during business hours, and the next-highest required 24 hour response - both reasonable if applied reasonably). Of course this new severity class was instantly abused to enact permanent crunch time. Even my humble suggestion of changing it from 9 am to 11 pm so I could have time for 8 hours of sleep with buffer time on each end was shot down.
Individual workers are powerless, only able to bring their own labor to the negotiation table. I was lucky to be able to just switch teams to get away from it, but would have much preferred the option of enacting positive change without changing jobs.
> Individual workers are powerless, only able to bring their own labor to the negotiation table.
What do you mean they are only able to bring their own labor to the table, what else is there that a laborer can bring to the table other than their own labor? If individual workers feel powerless that is probably not because of them possessing something other than their own labor while not being able to negotiate that something.
...what else is there that a laborer can bring to the table other than their own labor?
It's as if we're rediscovering the stated purpose of unions, right here in this thread! The union can negotiate with everyone's labor, not just that of an individual worker.
I understand the stated purpose. Why should an individual benefit from the abilities of others just because he/she happens to belong to the same community? I think if we can ask the question in its most basic form, which is what I am trying to do, it may be clarifying.
Many workers putting their labor on the table is a much, much stronger negotiating position than a single worker putting their labor on the table. This is the entire thesis of unions.
I am asking whether it is legitimate or not, I can't help but think how incredibly well it also applies to gangs when I hear that argument.
If more money is paid to individual employees just because they demanded the added cost to the employer makes them inherently less competitive and therefore able to earn less and therefore pay said employees lower wages over time or go out of business.
It would help here if you clarified what you mean by "legitimate"; do you mean morally?
The workers are responsible for creating almost all the value, since they do the work. Any money not going to the workers ought to be justified, rather than the negation. So to turn the question around: why are management & shareholders entitled to such a large share of what the workers produce? The answer is because management & shareholders are more powerful than any single worker, and this is abused to take more than their share. No moral justification is given or even considered. To unionize is to relatively equalize this power relation.
> It would help here if you clarified what you mean by "legitimate"; do you mean morally?
I mean is it rational.
> The workers are responsible for creating almost all the value, since they do the work.
Completely disagree. I believe most of the value of a company is created by the vision of its founding team and the execution of its leadership not the numerous workers along the hierarchy. I also think the 80-20 rule maybe a good way to identify how much value creation should be attributed to a group of workers ie on average most likely 80% of the value is created by 20% of workers.
What you mean by "execution of its leadership" is... telling other people to do the actual work. There's a term for startups where leaders mill around but no actual work is done, it's called playing house: http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html
> And if they do promise that maybe at best it’s their marketing PR and at worst look what communism did in Russia.
Good grief, really? We're pivoting from unions directly to Soviet communism?
The advantage of a union is collective bargaining. If I, on my own, ask my employer to alter the layout of their building so that I might have a private office they're quite likely to say no. And not unjustifiably - altering the entire floorplan of the office to accommodate one person is kind of an unreasonable request.
But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices - or the option of a private office - our request to the company is a lot more reasonable. And no individual employee is going to be singled out as a problematic troublemaker. Plus it's a lot more difficult for the company to say no.
> Good grief, really? We're pivoting from unions directly to Soviet communism?
I'm just pointing out the extremes so we can set the framework of the discussion, the reality is most likely somewhere between the extremes.
> But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices
Agreed, I also believe individual responsibility is paramount. If you want something ask for it and try to achieve it, if you lived in a society where everyone did that instead of being silent observers waiting for handouts then private companies would not be able to get away with the things that you point out.
Leverage. As an individual, the response of the company is likely to be "whatever, we can hire someone worse than you who won't make these demands." If hundreds of people are saying the same thing, we're in a better negotiating position.
It is funny that you attack pro-union folks with a comparison to Soviet propaganda when you yourself are spouting better propaganda than the USSR could ever have dreamed: capitalism is miserable, there's no way your salaries can ever be high while you're happy at work, deal with life sucking, workers have only their chains.
> "whatever, we can hire someone worse than you who won't make these demands."
So even by your argument the companies are forced to hire someone worse than you? This seems to me like capitalism working as intended, you are not ready to pay for employees you can afford therefore you get worse employees and your competitor wins and can pay even more for better employees and their demands.
Capitalism is definitely working as intended; I'm not disputing that. But there are two catches:
1. The intent of capitalism is that, over time, the free market adjusts to what is optimal. Capitalism doesn't say anything about how long that takes, about what the time constant for a certain input to the market is. While the market is responding to a transient, it operates inefficiently. (This is the entire reason, for instance, that non-manipulative high-frequency trading is profitable.) My position is that capitalism is doing what it's supposed to be doing slowly; certainly over the generations we have seen things get better for laborers. But I think we can achieve those goals faster, and speaking selfishly as someone who is not immortal, I'd like to do that.
2. The history of labor organizing is filled with government intervention removing the natural right of laborers to negotiate as participants in the market, while preserving (and perhaps creating) the right of managers to negotiate collectively under the legal form of a "corporation." Even today we have so-called "right-to-work" laws that interfere in free market negotiations between workers and managers, saying that certain private contractual agreements are invalid and cannot be negotiated. If the government stops interfering in the free market, capitalism will achieve its goal more effectively.
> If, as a top performer, I get penalized by joining the union then obviously Kickstarter looks less attractive to me.
I think this statement is used as an anti-union argument here a lot, and it speaks to the ego that many engineers/developers have. "Top performers" are single-digits in a lot of even medium sized organizations, and chances are that an individual employee falls outside of this "top performer" category even if they think they are one. The unions work for the majority. This means that the unions probably work for you.
Everyone wants to say they hire the top 1% of top 1% but in reality that's not possible, and most of them are sucked up in some pretty strange places or by big companies with lots and lots of incentives to throw at them.
raises hand
I see my job to be a human-shield whose sole purpose is to try to ensure something worthwhile gets done by the collective.
No shortage of smart-people. Tricky bit is keeping them pointing vaguely in the right direction and ensuring nobody upsets/interrupts them.
I'll fight my/their corner, but accept I may be wrong/out-of-my-depth if you can tell me why. Until then, I just soak up the grief.
Biggest turn-off - people who think personal excellence in one area is infinitely transferable.
I wouldn't consider myself a top performer. Though I'd expect I'd become one at a place that had a union ensuring low performers got accumulated at the company.
This is a problem everywhere, but it is worse when you are stuck with unionized employees. Compare public school teachers to private school teachers. Higher pay (thanks to unions) for public schools, and lower quality (thanks to unions).
I'm up in Canada where the teaching unions are actually pretty strong and the teachers are well compensated, but in the US teacher salaries are legendarily poor given the expectations placed on them and the importance of their job.
In fact, due to the extremely low salaries in either private or public schools many people who would consider teaching end up in different fields... _that_ is what is driving down the quality.
You sure it's the unions and not the fact that private schools get to cream-skim children from families with means who want to prioritize their education rather than being forced to take all comers?
> Higher pay (thanks to unions) for public schools, and lower quality (thanks to unions).
Mandated by government and paid for with taxes seems to be part of the equation too. I'm not commenting on whether that's a good or bad thing.
However, if a regular business ended up being forced into a situation where they had to overpay underperformers, they'd go out of business, probably for the better(?).
I'm interested in that also. I don't really see how you can compare public and private education without looking at class and the ability for the private school to select students. At the very least private school students have parents who can and will spend a significant amount of money on their kids education.
Look up rubber rooming in NY schools. Basically, they can't fire teachers with tenure (which they get relatively quickly compared to eg college professor tenure) for even gross misconduct, so they end up paying them to sit in a room doing nothing. If there isn't enough budget, they have to lay off newer teachers, even if they're doing well.
> Although teachers are now being charged more quickly, it still takes several years to complete the hearing process and for the arbitrator to render a decision.
So they get stood down until they've had a misconduct hearing, that seems fair, we don't want to ruin careers on allegations alone.
> In June 2012 it was revealed that the New York State Education Department had not paid its arbitrators for several years, and collectively owed them millions of dollars for cases they had completed, or were in the process of hearing. In frustration, ten of the 24 arbitrators on the New York City panel have quit, while the remaining 14 refuse to hear any testimony or issue any decisions until their back wages have been paid in full.
This is a massive administrative failure, I don't know why your blaming unions.
I'm not blaming them for the number of people in those rubber rooms or for the terrible administration of that school district. I am blaming them for how hard it is to fire a teacher the administration doesn't want, for whatever reason, to the point where new, exceptional teachers are being let go because they have to keep around older teachers with tenure who are phoning it in. That drags down the average quality of teaching in the US.
That said, I also think that good teachers should be paid much more to attract more talent, and make it a viable alternative to more careers for people who aren't willing to sacrifice their finances to teach.
EDIT: I should also note that NYC public schools are an incredibly challenging teaching environment, a lot of false accusations fly around, and I don't mean that all the teachers in the rubber rooms should be let go. I just disagree that teaching should be a tenured position.
> I am blaming them for how hard it is to fire a teacher the administration doesn't want, for whatever reason, to the point where new, exceptional teachers are being let go because they have to keep around older teachers with tenure who are phoning it in.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but is there any evidence that it is a huge problem and not isolated cases?
> That said, I also think that good teachers should be paid much more to attract more talent, and make it a viable alternative to more careers for people who aren't willing to sacrifice their finances to teach.
The problem is not having a way to quantify what a good teacher is. Is it the one that imparts a love of learning on there students or the one that gets better test results? Is it the one in the wealthy area or the one in the poor area where kids aren't even being fed? If the students do poorly is it the teachers fault or did a teacher in a previous year skip crucial topics?
Paying good teachers more isn't possible until you can identify good teachers.
> I just disagree that teaching should be a tenured position.
Well there I agree, it should at least be very rare. It does sound strange to me, I don't think it's a thing in my country and even in academia tenure isn't as strong.
Sadly, I've only heard anecdotal evidence from young teachers I know, and maybe some reading I've done in the past, so I don't have any sources on hand to point to, and maybe it's isolated rather than endemic.
You're right that it's hard to quantify whether someone is a good teacher or not, but I don't think it's impossible to judge. It's probably impossible to make it a simple succinct rubric, though. Maybe it's a challenge for a universal function approximator like a neural net :-)
And on the rare occasions they do recognize an above-average contributor, they're likley to overburden them with all the stressful and difficult work until they burn out.
Salary isn't the only point of negotiation. Unions can protect people against safety concerns, long hours or lack of vacation etc. or whatever issues are a problem at a company. A union is a group of people organizing to define how they want to work and salary structure doesn't have to part of the contract if it's not an issue to the workers. The union members get to define what is important to them.
Not sure why this is being downvoted beyond just not liking unions? It's literally a fact. Members decide what their collective goals are. In cases like nursing in California under staffing and long hours are the issues they are most concerned about above salary.
Agreed. I think Kickstarter employees jumping out and trying this is a good thing for the overall industry.
The majority of information I see online about software unions tends to be either anecdotal, or generalized across every industry rather than focused on a specific one (ie, on average, unions across all industries get X% higher pay).
This is being applied to a single company, so people who think it's terrible have no shortage of other places to go. It's high profile enough that Kickstarter trying to shut it down will get public blowback, so there's a better than average chance that they end up taking its demands seriously. It'll give at least one very tangible data point of, "here's what a software union in a software company looks like." And even if it does crash and burn, maybe we'll get some Kickstarter competitors out of it from prior employees.
I see very little downside. Let's have at least one trial somewhere, even if it's not perfect, that gives us at least some preview about what a US-based software union will look like.
What about unions do you think magically makes it impossible to fire someone who isn't doing the required work? The only thing that changes is you have to actually do the requisite paperwork and monitoring to validate that you're firing them with cause instead of for arbitrary reasons and pretending it's with cause. The "we can't fire someone who is honestly slacking" is just as much a consequence of bad bookkeeping and administration from the management.
It is exceptionally hard to measure work done by knowledge workers. Which makes is extremely hard to get enough hard documentation to fire them. In the vast majority of cases, you slowly realize they are no good and then you have to sink a bunch of time into organizing their work in a way that makes their underperformance measurable.
Just a quick question... But do you have any personal experience with the UAW (United Auto Workers Union)? Because while on it's face, I'd agree with your comment... but in experience I've seen things closer to what the other guy was implying.
