At the moment, I don't support engineers unionizing in tech. But my mind is open, and I'm ready to change my view on this.
Here's why this is where I stand:
System/software/hardware engineering is one of the most highly-compensated and least-regulated careers out there. It's the only career where an individual can make over $100,000/year without having to complete years of additional training or apprenticeship. Unlike consulting (also non-unionized), you don't even need to graduate from target schools to get paid in this industry! I'm not talking about pure cash comp, either. Tech and tech-adjacent companies typically offer very good insurance policies with low/no-cost, great long-term disability benefits, great vacation and time-off policies, and more.
Engineers have also been in a seller's market for a long time. "Recruiters fill my inbox so much, I have to ignore them" is a common trope in this industry. Engineers very much have the option of leaving a company if they disagree with work conditions.
All I see are companies spending more money on bolstering their legal and HR departments to implement union relations. Which means less money and benefits for us.
(disclosure: current Mapbox employee, in the proposed bargaining unit)
The primary value is that a union is the only realistic way a worker in the US can get their employment terms specified in a contract. Without a contract, these terms can in many cases be changed arbitrarily and with any amount of notice.
For example, Yahoo made remote employees either relocate to an office or resign in 2013 [0]. With a contract, the process by which this change could be made could be defined in advance.
Severance is another example. In many companies, the amount of severance an employee will receive is not disclosed in advance. A common process is to offer the lowest amount the company thinks the employee will accept and still sign a separation agreement. This penalizes employees without substantial savings. And since there's a short window to exercise potentially expensive stock options after termination, many employees have an urgent need for a large lump sum of cash right away. The employee is in a weaker position without a contract specifying severance.
A contract could also do things like limit non-compete clauses. These are already non-enforceable in California, but are still common in other areas of the country.
Judging by the disclosures in the proxy statements of public tech companies, executives frequently have these types of provisions in their employment contracts. Because of their position, they're able to negotiate these individually; regular workers need to act collectively to get similar benefits.
Also, I can see a universe in which the proliferation of unions causes a rift in the industry between Union and non-Union employers. Wouldn’t this reduce the already extensive mobility that engineers have in the market?
No that's right, unions can't prevent layoffs or office closures, the idea isn't to prevent any sort of changes. To use a programming metaphor, it's more about avoiding undefined behavior. We use contracts to define professional relationships in almost all other contexts; employment relationships are unusual in having terms that are largely unspecified.
A union is just a framework for negotiating a contract. It does two unique, significant things: it allows for negotiating a contract that covers a group of workers (rather than an individual), and it requires the company to negotiate in good faith (they can't just refuse to agree to a contract at all).
The contract itself is the important part, and the details are going to vary based on the situation. A $1M minimum salary wouldn't make sense at a tech company, but is reasonable in the NBA. On relocations, you're probably not going to forbid them, but maybe you have some specified amount of severance for this situation for people who can't move to the new location. Or maybe there's a minimum amount of notice the company needs to provide, so people don't have to pull their kids out of school in the middle of the year or whatever.
I don't see why it would necessarily reduce mobility. I think it would make the company a more appealing place to work, so perhaps people would be more likely to stay at a unionized shop, but I don't think that's really all that different from someone staying at Google because they like the office cafeteria.
Mostly, though, I think a union is not as extreme of a change as it's sometimes portrayed. It can't make money appear out of thin air, or turn around a failing company or industry, but it also doesn't prevent innovation or remove the flexibility to reward high performance. It's just a way for employees to put themselves on more equal footing with the company when setting employment terms.
Every highly paid software dev doesn't see the point of unions until they get screwed over by management.
USA has this really perverse view that unions are about dragging everyone down to the level of the worst employee, demanding money and gangsta standover men.
Most unions are about having someone in your corner when the big bad company decides to step on little old you. It's about having legal backing so some bro startup lord can't make your life a misery because you objected to him sexually harassing you.
I've worked at large dev companies, and had to put up with years of bullshit, team cuts, denied payrises because of other teams not getting their shit down, seeing teams lauded for breaking the rules then other teams threatened with firing for copying the favoured teams, teams gutted to make blackops groups for whatever stupid idea an exec currently likes then the originals teams getting no bonuses because they can't keep up. The vast majority of people in charge in software are selfish jerks, whether they are born again coders or mba suits brought in to increase profits. Unions are there so you are not alone
Now I work in one of the most unionised organisations in the country. Management might still be bastards, but I have thousands people on my side.
I’m skeptical because I don’t necessarily trust the people who would be at the top of a union to align with my preferences better than status quo. Some of the orthodox opinions in the community are not mine. But it would go something like this:
Despite tech workers’ financial power, management gets away with many widely unpopular working conditions. Think of the ubiquity of open offices, or of offices in general. Or sprints, or story points, or JIRA. Or the prioritization of new feature work over reliability and refactoring. Or the infamous crunch time near a deadline. Or the unfairness and perverse incentives in a promotion process. Coworkers making more than you because they joined at a lower stock price or had better counteroffers. Theoretically, workers could get more control over these conditions.
There are also many things programmers are asked to build, which at least the loudest among us find reprehensible. This includes anything to do with advertising, personal data, aggressive sales practices, dark patterns, etc. Programmers could reduce the prevalence of these things by collectively refusing to work on them. Even informal rumblings made some headway on this kind of thing at Google.
Finally there is a more general leftist solidarity angle where programmers could “make the world a better place” by using their own indispensability to leverage their employers into better pay and conditions for others. Kitchen staff, cleaning crew, even gig workers contracted through the platforms they work on. Tech workers have a better chance of getting this sort of thing done by contract than by legislation.
> Despite tech workers’ financial power, management gets away with many widely unpopular working conditions. Think of the ubiquity of open offices, or of offices in general. Or sprints, or story points, or JIRA. Or the prioritization of new feature work over reliability and refactoring. Or the infamous crunch time near a deadline. Or the unfairness and perverse incentives in a promotion process. Coworkers making more than you because they joined at a lower stock price or had better counteroffers. Theoretically, workers could get more control over these conditions.
I don’t think any of these things are bad?
To the point of open offices: this is highly preferential. I personally prefer them over high-density cubicles for the peons and actual dedicated offices for management. (I’ve seen some places create offices for teams, but that’s not the norm.) I’d rather see further maturity of hybrid/WFH workflows.
About Jira: At the end of the day, most of us write software to accomplish a business need. That need is usually tied to a date and funded with money. As long as both of those things are true, estimation in any form will be necessary. While I’ve seen story points and scrum ceremonies get horribly mangled and abused, at their core, I think they are a significant improvement over man-hours, Gantt charts, and status meetings.
About new employees making more than old ones: That’s just market dynamics. Management will always try to pay as little as they can get away with. Unless you always overpay for general contracting, auto repair, or any other services, you probably do as well. Market rate will always increase with demand, so most companies will always pay more for new people and ensure that your compensation increases minimally. Good companies who care about not losing talent will ensure their people are getting paid market (because losing people over money is stupid if you can afford to keep them).
I’d rather have my value determined by the market than it be determined by union members “representing me.”
In a union, the leadership is negotiating for you. So the person in charge of your employment that the union is replacing is you, not management. They could negotiate things like more PTO, better conditions, or a larger bonus instead of a straight base pay. But as the employee you might want straight up higher base pay. Or maybe the union gets a promotion process that values seniority more than performance. It might save you from a political process or having to play the game, but can hurt other people.
The idea is that unions help the collective and will get a generally better deal then you might get on your own. But again the isn't going to get everything from management and they have to decide what to prioritize. So if your priorities are different than union leadership your wishes might get left behind to help more other people.
I can’t really imagine a union negotiating in the interests of privileged, mid six figure, 1%er software engineers. Even if it is made of us. That’s a little bit cravenly capitalistic for the kind of people who would be running a union in San Francisco. Rather, I think it would say that we, the members, are the powerful, and we have an obligation to use our collective power and wealth to advance broader left causes.
I don’t really want to get into it with my coworkers over exactly what our issue profile is, nor accept what I think the loudest voices will say. I prefer to choose my political organizations separately from my job.
Now if it’s truly going to just self-interestedly fight for our already well served interests, sure.
> System/software/hardware engineering is one of the most highly-compensated and least-regulated careers out there
Not saying this is the case with most engineers today, at least yet, but do you think mistreatment would be OK as long as the compensation is high enough? In other words, can compensation ever be the singular metric of welfare?
Second issue is proportionality. Being compensated well doesn’t mean they are compensated proportionally. This is certainly the case for high tech if you look at per employee profit numbers. Doesn’t mean profit has to be distributed uniformly but it means it is not distributed proportionally for a non-zero number of employees.
You have to understand that a company is by definition organized around its interests, they don’t miss opportunities because managers can’t coordinate every year on how much to change the compensation. But employees by default are not in a state of organization; thus have a 1-to-n relationship to the company. This asymmetry in the degree of organization makes it combinatorially more difficult for employees to represent their interests.
> All I see are companies spending more money on bolstering their legal and HR departments to implement union relations. Which means less money and benefits for us.
This is arguing that unions depress wages. That’s demonstrably false [1]. Do you want higher wages and better working conditions? Get a union. If you think you have leverage now, imagine what you could do with even more leverage.
If you want to preserve the benefits you describe, unionize. If you want to rely on the goodwill of executives keeping things how they’ve been, don’t. But remember - executives are working as hard as possible to drive developer costs down.
> At the moment, I don't support engineers unionizing in tech.
Thankfully in many European countries the unions work across industries, it doesn't matter what you do at your desk, everyone on the building gets into the union.
So what do I get?
40 hours work week, want me to do more? Pay extra or give additional vacation days in exchange.
If I am ill or you fail to find a job for me, you cannot just fire me without compensating me for it, and giving a legal reason why.
I get a proper severance package in mass firings.
Whatever you send me to my work email or phone, won't be dealt with until I get back in office, regardless how you feel about it.
Ah, consulting can also be also unionized, unless you are doing it as freelancer.
Not sure why the need for unionizing at Mapbox in particular, but generally not all engineering departments in different industries are treated the same.
You'd think that because earning potential is so much higher in other adjacent fields where you're doing the same exact job, people would just leave, but that seems to be a lot more personal than economic.
Many of those jobs are in places that are incredibly expensive to live. You can get by with 100k in SF (save good amounts for retirement) but you're not on track to buy a house anytime soon.
It looks more attractive than it is in many cases.
At the moment, I don't support engineers unionizing in tech. But my mind is open, and I'm ready to change my view on this.
Here's why this is where I stand:
System/software/hardware engineering is one of the most highly-compensated and least-regulated careers out there. It's the only career where an individual can make over $100,000/year without having to complete years of additional training or apprenticeship. Unlike consulting (also non-unionized), you don't even need to graduate from target schools to get paid in this industry! I'm not talking about pure cash comp, either. Tech and tech-adjacent companies typically offer very good insurance policies with low/no-cost, great long-term disability benefits, great vacation and time-off policies, and more.
Engineers have also been in a seller's market for a long time. "Recruiters fill my inbox so much, I have to ignore them" is a common trope in this industry. Engineers very much have the option of leaving a company if they disagree with work conditions.
All I see are companies spending more money on bolstering their legal and HR departments to implement union relations. Which means less money and benefits for us.