My point was more that the "if you don't like your job, you can easily leave" isn't as much of an option for people as many think. If you can manage to get through the interview cancer, you still run the risk of your next job being equally as bad, or worse than before.
I don't think unions are going to be much use here, however, and they may even make things worse. Raising the industry-average cost of an employee means fewer jobs in the industry, meaning even more difficulty for an employee to "just get a job elsewhere if you don't like it".
This is an industry founded upon the principles of innovation and invention, is it not? Perhaps tech can invent a union that can overcome issues found in the unions of the past.
> This is an industry founded upon the principles of innovation and invention, is it not? Perhaps tech can invent a union that can overcome issues found in the unions of the past.
Throughout human history, unions are one of the few ways that ordinary citizens can actually stand up against concentrated power (democracy, revolutions are some other ways). Rather than trying to invent something new, maybe study the past a bit more.
It's the same principle which professional organizations use to keep compensation high for doctors and lawyers: set a limit on the number of entrants.
Restricting entry is a fundamental feature of unions: it protects those who are already in industry at the expense of potential new employees who might otherwise come in and undercut wages.
That said if you want to standardize the admissions process, a professional organization is a tried and true way to accomplish this: doctors and lawyers take a standardized test, become accredited, and can take on any job without being grilled for their technical skills.
Perhaps, but all of this talk about forcing licensing and certification to restrict engineering labor supply seems to fly in the face of the actual unionization efforts in the OP- the workplace improvements are mostly about addressing HR-related complaints and building a better environment, not pay raises:
There's plenty of issues in the tech industry that a union or some other professional association or guild (or even the IEEE, with teeth) could address that have nothing to do with giving developers higher wages.
Ah, the good old "those corporate boomers elsewhere are uncreative and therefore we'll beat them easily" trope. It's certainly possible, but I have doubts that the generation of scrum teams and open-space offices will solve unions. Innovation is hard no matter who is doing it, and most of the "innovation" seen in the valley is just applying existing solved problems to economies of scale, made possible by advancements in the supply chain (such as the SaaS paradigm).
Tech is an industry that believes it can disrupt everything from hotels and taxis to space travel to food and nutrition to the very concept of money. Not to mention the speculative life sciences companies, those who presume to be in the business of disrupting death itself.
I just find it amazing that a community so wrapped up in its own hubris always seems throws up its hands when the subject of labor relations comes up, insisting that no further improvement is possible. (Also of amusement is that KS, a crowdfunding startup, is ostensibly is about disrupting how goods are created and sold). So perhaps the industry is selective about what it believes tech is capable of inventing?
Also, a tech union wouldn’t be an advocate of open offices or the overuse of scrum, if the HN commentariat is representative of industry workers.
