Because US-style unions are bad for top performers. Incompetent employees don’t get fired and seniority takes priority over skills.
Overall, this encourages everyone to act in the bare minimum fashion and the business will suffer when pitted against a motivated workforce at a competitor. Unless the business has a very big moat, it will collapse under the union bloat.
Unions will never take root in the tech industry because the workers see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed top performers :)
Even Amazon FC workers, and SV employees who had their wages suppressed by illegal collusion, it seems.
Would you like your us tech salary replaced by the European one? My take, as someone outside both regions is that even after medical and rental and other such fixed costs, us tech workers continue to make tons more than European tech workers. The top paying tech companies in Europe are, from what I understand, American.
Then do it. They are desperate for tech employees. As it stands, taking the European offer is not rational even after taking into account the value of the welfare from the state.
The only people it makes sense for are those with other reasons to go (culture, family, etc).
And it's really too bad because in a decade or two, the tech industry will really need one. I used to be against unionizing too, but then heard this scenario: there will come a time in the near-future when the average software job starts being outsourced en masse (and I'm not talking about rote IT support). When that day comes, how will we be able to fight that?
Unions won't help that. What will help is being better, or lifting the wages of the out sourced countries. My company is finding India is more expensive than Germany right now (we are picking the best people in India which are more expensive, but well worth the additional price), and looking for other places to outsource to for savings.
What will help is being better, or lifting the wages of the out sourced countries.
That is the, as some would say, the "blackpill" that is toughest to swallow. Developers in the West need to realize their relatively high salaries are on borrowed time. It all will come to an equilibrium, but that doesn't mean we can't still fight for our collective rights to keep as much money in the country as possible.
OP is right about "lifting the wages of the out sourced countries". International workers movements really are important. We need capital controls based on labor and environmental standards not nationalism to avoid a race to the bottom.
>>there will come a time in the near-future when the average software job starts being outsourced en masse
I've been hearing this for 30 years, and went through all buzzwords: outsourcing (India), off-shoring (China) and whatever catchy name they gave Russia/Ukraine..
The world never ended, the pay never went down, and the jobs didn't disappear. The doomsayers will be right one day.. but not today :-)
A lot of outsourcing practically relies these days on very codified process maintained by software... And that software is usually developed domestically.
It wouldn't take a lot for the domestic software developers to passively sabotage such software via collective action of failure to maintain it and letting the first unexpected heavy dependency crashing bring the whole system down. Even if a lot of company ops are outsourced, having all your site reliability engineers walk off the job sets the company up for any small fire to quickly become a large one.
I don't see how that answers either of my questions, or continues the thread of discussion I was attempting to pull on. Are you saying that unions would enable sabotage to prevent outsourcing? If so, I disagree. Software used by businesses often has many external vendors (notable ones in software: GitHub, Slack, Teams...). The idea that an internal dev team could sabotage these sufficiently to prevent outsourcing sounds far-fetched to me.
I shouldn't have used "sabotage;" it has the wrong connotation.
A union can organize through collective action a walkout of software maintainers. Few organizations (big or small) run automatically indefinitely without the hundreds to thousands of changes per day such teams make. The three examples you've provided (GitHub, Slack, Teams) often grow per-enterprise integrations to make them work the right way for a given company, and when those integrations crash, who will be available to restore or correct them?
Through simple inaction, a site reliability team can "cause" a company's infrastructure to spin itself apart by simply refraining from stopping it from spinning itself apart.
That's a shared understanding of acceptable working conditions informing both union policy and import/export policy. Unions as an output of a much larger change upstream, as opposed to an input when talking about outsourcing.
Funny, didn't the rise of offshoring coincide with the decline of unions in the USA? So: Getting rid of unions really helped keep factory jobs in the country, didn't it?
Big tech companies, especially Google, are spending massive amounts of money to get everyone in the world to code. Don't be fooled by their faux-magnanimous PR bullshit, this is an effort to drive down their largest expense: software developer salaries.
I don’t buy this. I see myself as a top performer and I’m very well paid, but I know I’m not getting nearly the same amount as the investor class. I’m not greedy either—I make much more than I need, but I don’t think our society benefits when the lion’s share of compensation goes to the super wealthy. I do understand the nuance in that the investors are putting their capital on the line, and that is worth something, but a line must be drawn to avoid runaway inequality.
>I do understand the nuance in that the investors are putting their capital on the line, and that is worth something, but a line must be drawn to avoid runaway inequality.
Agreed. The significance of the capital risk loss on most investors actual livelihoods and future investments is very often over dramatized. The risk is purely capital and at a certain point, capital accumulates capital.
Once you reach a certain level of capital accumulation that your needs and even wants are met, the rest by stable low risk and nearly fully secure investments, anything beyond that can be easily risked in incredibly high risk investments (or higher risk investments) in hopes for big payoffs. Rinse, repeat, and you might become stupidly successful or might just dither around being fully financially independent.
When people talk about investor risk, they often think about Bob or Pam down the street pulling out their life savings to take a risk and put their all in the business they're going to start up. This isn't how most investors look, most investors aren't taking much of any personal risk other than the risk of not improving their standard of living beyond an already very good standard of living. This type of risk to me is overly rewarded in our financial system. If Bob or Pam fail, they're screwed. If a typical investor fails, they wait until they snowball some more capital and try again.
> If you are very well paid you likely are the investor class. Nearly every tech company that pays well does so via equity.
Getting paid in equity doesn't make you “the investor class”, aka the capitalist class, aka the haut bourgeoisie.
Having the overwhelming share of your support coming from capital returns rather than pay for labor does that, but equity as a component of labor compensation doesn’t, alone, do that, or even move you out of the working (primarily dependent on labor income) class into the middle (split dependency on labor and capital with neither dominating) class.
> Unions will never take root in the tech industry because the workers see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed top performers
In Europe tech workers also make ~40% less than American tech workers after taxes, retirement/pension, and healthcare. I’m sure that’s not entirely attributable to unions, (and I would genuinely be interested in understanding the full cause of the disparity) but I imagine it plays a role.
I don't disbelieve you, but this doesn't rebut my claim at all. To be clear, I didn't claim that Europeans prefer to move to the US, only that the US compensation packages are better for software professionals.
No surprise. Generally speaking nobody uproots their life by moving countries unless the upside is massive. If you're already a well compensated white collar professional where you live now the upside is not that large.
Those are all standard benefits for tech workers in America (at least if you're willing to move to a tech hub, which is where the interesting work is anyway). Plus 50-200% more pay.
I do agree that Europe does a good job of guaranteeing decent working conditions for the bottom half of the labor market, and it's totally reasonable to prefer a society where those benefits are widely available to everyone. But from an individual comp/benefits perspective for a skilled engineer there really isn't a comparison -- the US wins hands down.
> it is considered a "professional" field and is exempt from the requirement.
Legally that is true. However practically only a very few tech companies don't exceed that standard. (the exceptions are mostly startups, which if things work out will make the people taking the risk worth far more in the long run - I don't think the risks are worth it but enough people have made millions on those deals to call it completely stupid)
Agreed. If you're in a startup, you can think of your stock as overtime pay, and it looks a lot better than what you would make earning 40% less with OT pay.
I’m pretty sure US startups still pay more in salary than the average or median European software developer salary, so in the worst case the American startup employee finds themselves in a comparable economic situation to the European software professional (except that the American can always go to a FAANG or fintech and make double). Hardly a “great depression” scenario.
Fair, software engineers in tech hubs universally meet the $107k minimum salary threshold which means employers aren't required to pay overtime.
That said, overtime is only expected in a few corners of the industry anyway, game development and pre-growth-stage startups being two of them. It's pretty easy to avoid those sectors if you want to maintain a 40-hour schedule. I've never been expected to put in overtime in my career, either in or out of FAANG.
A big if, and then waste those 50-200% into getting what is standard here, possibly alongside a double mortage and better never get any serious sickness, no thanks.
No, the extra 50-200% is in addition to the employer-provided healthcare benefits and retirement match.
If you get seriously sick, you're much more likely to get effective and timely treatment with the gold-plated health insurance plans provided by US tech employers than the options I'm familiar with in Europe.*
I'll 100% grant that the US healthcare system is really messed up, and if you're not in a highly-compensated field you're probably better off in most European systems. I'm socially liberal and would much rather the US system were more equitable, even if that means my own personal experience gets a bit worse. But that doesn't change the fact that if you're an in-demand engineer your personal interactions with the US system will be great.
* To be fair, I've only lived in London and Barcelona, so there may be other parts of Europe with better healthcare systems. But at least compared to those two cities, I've had much better experiences with my employer-provided health coverage in the US than in the public UK or private Spanish healthcare systems I've used.
A funded startup will generally provide health insurance of some kind, although at the very earliest stages it's probably not great. As startups get larger and less cash-poor overall comp (including health insurance) increases significantly.
In my specific case though I was bootstrapping my own startup, which had no funding, revenue, or employees. (I survived by living off my wife's PhD stipend at the time.)
Europeans have a very distorted sense of American healthcare. Your media, like ours, is not accurate or reliable. The American healthcare system doesn’t work well for the lower classes, but it generally works very well for the professional class and up. Of course this isn’t to say it shouldn’t be reformed to be more like the European healthcare system, but it’s not because the European system is better for professionals. Additionally, the extra 50-200% (not sure about that upper bound figure) is after accounting for “what is standard for Europeans” i.e., healthcare and pension.
I looked into this precisely because I was interested in moving to Europe for a while and found it would be very difficult for me to afford for my wife and I to both live in Europe and travel Europe on my salary alone (and the odds of her finding work in Europe seemed slim).
I think that's only true for the very poorest Americans and I don't think they enjoy the same quality of healthcare that the professional class enjoys. In general, Medicare seems to be really complicated and it varies tremendously by state, so it's hard to generalize about the kind of healthcare poorer people receive.
It’s not Medicare it’s Medicaid and the qualification can be up to 400% of the poverty line and the coverage tends to be quite good with minimal ($5) out of pocket costs. In some areas it can be harder to find a family doctor because Medicaid pays them so little for a visit, but drug coverage, for example is comparable to private plans (with way less out of pocket).
And now with Obamacare exchanges, low incomes folks can qualify for substantial premium subsidies. Deductibles and out of pocket limits can still be significant, but one could consider it catastrophic coverage.
At least in New York, medicaid is still annoying in that it's hard to schedule appointments quickly, and many procedures require submitting forms to authorize (more waiting).
Basically the general balkanized-bureaucratic chaos that affects all US healthcare is not ameliorated by medicaid being the single payer. Something simplified and streamlined like the UK NHS sounds much better.
> Something simplified and streamlined like the UK NHS sounds much better.
I have lots of friends in the UK including some who work for the NHS and none of them characterize it as “streamlined” or “simplified”. “Bottomless money put” has come up a few times. I’m sharing this out of amusement more than anything; I fully support single payer and I suspect even the UK’s NHS is better than America’s system in general.
Again, the benefit is standard among tech workers here as well. We can still appreciate Europe without the pretense that it is better than America for every category of citizen. No need for the defensiveness.
I believe this used to be the case (and completely agree on the illegal collusion acceptance). But as software continues to eat the world, the average software engineer reflects more the average employee.
Top performers doesn't like SAG, they'd prefer not to be in it but SAG forces them to pay their union fees and not take non-union contracts anyway since most big budget movies are union shops.
And you can't compare professions where you get paid for fame with professions where you get paid for performance. It is really hard to prevent famous people from making loads of cash, but it is very easy to prevent high performers from getting a higher salary than their peers as both companies and unions would prefer that.
Film stars are their own brand. People will go see the new Owen Wilson movie but they won’t buy software just because it’s built by Frank the SWE. This isn’t a good comparison IMO.
Significant software is rarely an individual effort. Same with movies of course but a film star can have an outsized impact.
A lot of software does often have a credits splash screen somewhere, if it's open source you can probably see contributions on GitHub, etc. Game designers are fairly well known even if all the coders aren't.
Not necessarily. It just institutionalises office politics. If you’re in a customer-facing role, the skills that make you successful at lobbying customers and lobbying your union might be identical.
The NFL Players League and the Screen Actors Guild do not operate this way. Their top performers negotiate significantly higher salaries for themselves (check out what Tom Cruise is getting for a film) while retaining the protections of the guild.
Why wouldn't organized labor in software build their unions the same way?
I don't know how it is in the US, but here in Germany unions are democratic entities. They are pretty much exactly what (the actively voting subset of) their members want them to be.
Have you ever worked for a union? It's just another entity that you have to negotiate with, except not only are they a self interested entity like your employer, but they also average out your interests within the context of their other members. It's good if you were on the bottom half of the distribution and you don't value independence/personal leverage. If you are a talented individual who is able to make your worth known to a self interested employer, such that you can typically negotiate higher pay, or choose to work on specific things, at specific hours, etc, unions can be extremely constraining. They often have arbitrary systems in place of meritocracies, where a position you might be better suited for, which your employer would prefer to have you do, will instead go to someone with seniority, or someone who has played the union political game better than you.
In other words, it's just another interested party that gets inserted as a middle man between you and your employer. If you weren't lacking in leverage, which most engineers are not, you're unlikely to find the upside.
> If you are a talented individual who is able to make your worth known to a self interested employer, such that you can typically negotiate higher pay, or choose to work on specific things, at specific hours, etc, unions can be extremely constraining.
I’ve never worked in an Amazon Warehouse but I don’t think there’s any room to negotiate any of that - no matter how good you are, you’re still a replaceable cog to Amazon.
Which is why Amazon Warehouse workers are a good target for unions, while tech workers are not. If amazon figures out a way to measure productivity of warehouse workers and reward the better ones, then suddenly they are not a good target of unions.
Unions work when people are all equal in output. Assembly lines are only as fast the line, it doesn't matter how much faster you can put that bolt in the hole than the next guy: it just means you have more time to wait for the next widget to come before you can put the bolt in the hole, so you can't be worth more than the guy who barely gets done in time (and the guy who is a little slower needs to be fired)
Everyone is replaceable, this is fact and people need to recognize this fact
However even roles where the skill set is filled by more people a good worker, that shows up on time, has few absences, performs the job with limited errors, and has higher productivity then other members will be valued more by the company, and (in a non-union setting) often be giving more wage increased, promotions etc
In a union setting however none of that matters, everyone is on the exact same contract, and the pay is often determined by tenure not performance.
Which operates in an industry entirely different from labor. You’re delusional if you think acting and manual labor are in the same bucket. Besides, every union differs from the next but they’re generally all cesspools of political wrangling and promotion based on seniority. Everyone I’ve known that belongs to a union is just cashing a check and waiting to retire with a pension, 0 ambition.
Exceptions do not make a rule, i am not sure why people think pointing to SAG and a few A List celebs is proof of anything other than the fact we as a society over value entertainment
The stereotypical anti-union case are rules that are about making work for other employees rather than providing higher wages and shorter hours. Think “you’re not allowed to plug that in: that’s a job for the lighting Union”
Decreased managerial discretion and increased rigidity in assignment and pay.
Obviously this is a doubled edged sword.
As long as you hit whatever metrics the agreement says you're gonna be tracked by you'll say employed and get your scheduled raises. People can be real jerks to everyone around them and cause all sorts of problems while still doing whatever their on-paper job duties are.
The guy who wants to work his butt off make everyone happy and pivot that built up goodwill into a quick promotion or internal transfer to a different role is usually SOL in those kinds of workplaces.
