Look how great unionizing has worked out for NBA players. You can have a union and still have competitive salaries and firings. The biggest thing I would want to see a tech union implement would be a cap of executive total compensation of 50:1 of the median employee compensation and a revenue/profit sharing agreement like in the NBA where the players get 51% of all revenue. We would all see massive increases in our compensation. Look at how the Unionized UPS drivers get 6 figures for just delivering packages. Obviously this wouldn’t work at small startups but at companies 10+ years old with > 5000 employees this should be the case. Also we could limit the union just to engineers so we don’t have to share our percentage of revenue/profit with the people who say they work in “tech” but work in HR. The NBA has a similar setup
Swe isn't a limited skill WW. The NBA (and others) get to unionized because what else would basketball fans watch? The WNBA? Lolz
Delivering packages is a limited skill WW?
No and neither is teaching. The proximity of the worker to the warehouse, however, does have limited pool of available workers. That's not a thing for swe work.
Sounds like a recipe for H1B expansion. Unless swe can get over their racism and include H1B workers in their union, probably won't work".
It would include workers on visas.
If it works for professional athletes, it has to work for everyone, right?
It works for package delivers at UPS
Unions are not free. They have paid organizers which turn into small bureaucracies. Are you ok giving up a portion of your pay for "dues". What if you pay dues and nothing fundamentally happens or they give you benefits you don't need? I suspect it hasn't happened because there hasn't been a good ROI when people did this in the past. I assume the scarcity of qualified candidates is a better force than a union can provide.
The dues talking point always rings hollow. The union-driven comp increases and benefits always outweigh the dues. There are problems with unions but the dues aren’t really a problem.
“What if you pay dues and nothing fundamentally happens?” What if I pay into my health insurance and I never end up going to the doctor?
A union is formed due to a lack of mutual trust and every communication and negotiation goes through a third party. That’s how you end up with middle to lower quality team members because they know they can’t get fired easily. You also give up being rewarded for good performance since negotiations are done as a group.
Why the heck do you care about your team members “quality” if you’d get paid more? I’m not proposing we turn this into something like teachers unions with tenure that make it impossible to be fired. NBA, NFL, etc players can still be released or not signed to new contracts
Because they’ve been sold the lie that unions are bad and the technology industry is different so they don’t need them.
Just look at the comments lol. Numerous anti-union dudes very clearly drinking the koolaid provided by managers and billionaires.
My first job was at a union shop. It wasn't great at all. Doesn't mean that union is necessarily bad, but also means it won't necessarily be good.
Never going to happen in America.
That’s how you stop innovation
Have you tried unionizing? You can either contact an existing union to have your company join or try one of the union apps like https://unitworkers.com
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Why are software engineers so dumb? how does this work for public companies? do you think people invest just for the lolz?
UPS is a public company and seems to be doing just fine