Awesome to see something like this on HN. As we keep working for less pay, more hours, the constant threat of layoffs, and business leaders frothing at the mouth to replace us all with AI, it's important to remember that we aren't powerless as workers. It's also important to remember that your relationship to the higher-ups is adversarial. They want to get as much productivity out of you for as little pay as possible. It's not because they're evil, it's just good business. Organizing helps protect us as things get worse.<p>I see a lot of my colleagues resigned to the reality we live in and just hoping they get lucky enough to come out on the right side of the meat grinder by making a few bucks at a startup. I've worked in a couple industries, and tech workers seem to lack solidarity in a way I haven't seen elsewhere. I survived three rounds of layoffs at a startup, and every time the attitude among some of my colleagues was that we "trimmed the fat." I somewhat agreed and got caught up in that culture until I got picked up in the fourth round of layoffs at a time when I felt I was doing my best work. We need each other as workers to get through a future that looks gloomy for technology developers. As the saying goes: "united we bargain, divided we beg." A better world is possible!
I am an engineering manager for a large team of developers. Part of my job is to estimate the cost and potential revenue of big projects. I have a spreadsheet of everyone's salaries (including bonus compensation, other perks).<p>I've done the math at my own company: average developer salary is approximately $100k. Our largest teams have 10 developers, so about $1M in labor costs. These teams work on projects that bring the company $10M every year.<p>We literally earn $1,000,000 for every $100,000 developer salary. Developers are some of the most productive workers in the world, but only keep 10-20% of the fruits of their own labor.<p>I am shocked that developers haven't figured this out. Almost all of the value they create goes into the pockets of their CEO.
This write up sounds like it describes a very particular subset of companies. If you only want to work at the flashy unicorns in downtown San Francisco, you are signing yourself up for exploitation.<p>Like any career, if you get off the beaten path there are plenty of pretty okay jobs out there. Especially if you have a marketable skill. This is software, if you have a brain and functional hands - you already own the means of production!<p>I absolutely support unions - but you're going to personally be better off changing companies and working your career ladder and finding the spot for you than sticking around at an exploitative company just because they have a union.
When I was a high school teacher you either had to belong to the union (CTA) or pay the same dues anyway, and the difference was that they didn't let you vote. I felt that about 90% of the dues were used against me and the students. That was the other big reason I quit, besides the low pay, which the union didn't fix. So I moved on to become a much higher paid developer who has zero pressure to join a union.<p>My dad was a big union guy. He never crossed a picket line, hated a scab, voted straight Democrat, and put the decal on his tool box. But growing up I saw his own union (IBEW) treat him like shit as he became an employer, and cheat him out of half of his pension. He praised unions while circumventing his own to stay in business.<p>If unions catch up to me, like the barbed wire caught up to the old cowboys, I'll go look for greener pastures. I'm happier making my own deal with the boss.
Software engineering is one of the ways of playing life in "easy mode" (I moved from academia over a decade ago, and I know the difference). This blog post tries to paint it differently - and it feels like it lacks perspective compared to virtually any other occupation.<p>> We’re living in a world where billion dollar tech companies expect us to live and breathe code, demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion."<p>Yet, it is up to us. In some software jobs (AAA game dev and a certain type of startup), you are expected to crunch beyond limits. In other places, you can have a typical 40h/week job at a salary way better than the average 9-5 job. Or you can freelance a dozen hours a week and live in a remote cottage. Or work from Thailand when it's winter. Or take a gap year to regenerate, or reinvent, yourself.<p>Not many career choices support this freedom. In some (e.g., medical careers), grind is not optional—you won't finish university, you won't get established, and that's the end of the story. In many other jobs, if you were freelancing a dozen hours a week, you would literally not be able to afford food. In many professions, quitting means the end of a career - or at least a serious setback; in tech, it means getting many messages on LinkedIn.<p>Don't get me wrong - I am all for criticism of grind and exploitation. But let's not paint ourselves, members of one of the most privileged occupations, as victims of the global system.
The author seems to think that everybody works this way. In reality, many of us work 40-45 hour weeks with no on call and low amounts of meetings. These jobs are in the boring (military, banking, insurance etc) sectors but I make a good, not great, living.
I think unions need to work on their marketing. I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems."<p>What's the A+ example out there of a unionized engineering team that has been able to find a great work-life balance, great benefits, and a fun product development life-cycle that is profitable or clearly on its way to profitability? Show me this company.<p>I have family and friends who work for airline unions, parcel unions, teacher unions, etc. Some love it, some hate it. Those who love it had a broken fan in the van all summer with no air conditioning until the union stepped in. How would a union meaningfully improve that situation at a tech office with paid lunches and decent benefits?<p>Like, the promise of a better tomorrow from unions carries the same tone as a promise to IPO "really soon" from the CEO/CFO tag team at the annual kick-off meeting. What does it look like when rubber meets the road?
I have a hard time with this pitch because I've watched people burn out working alongside me, on the same team, for the same boss, on the same problems, for entirely personal reasons. I've also been in shitty situations with shitty bosses that caused me a lot of stress, and it's hard to point to any clear lines that were crossed. I haven't heard any proposed union rule that would protect me in those situations, just promises that if a union existed, things would be better. It needs to be more specific.<p>We see what unions do for working class people, but our level of compensation, education, and cultural capital gives us everything that a traditional union gives to blue collar workers. Literacy, internet access, and money go a long way. We don't need a union to tell us what our legal rights are or help pay for a lawyer for us. We don't need a union to tell us what workplace conditions are legal or illegal. We don't need a union to tell us when and how it's safe or unsafe, effective or ineffective to report corporate malfeasance. Again, we have literacy, internet access, and money for legal representation.<p>Maybe a union could benefit me somehow, but I'm going to need much more concrete examples than just hey, your job is unpleasant sometimes, join a union!
These articles about work conditions in tech feel profoundly out of touch with the rest of the world. It's like reading a gazette from Mary Antoinette talking about how tough her life was (pre-revolution..)<p>The rest of the world outside of tech, looks at tech and sees a bunch of very overpaid developers with quite cushy perks...<p>Like sure, it would be great to unionise... But if tech workers don't acknowledge their privelege, they shouldn't be shocked when no-one else turnsout to support them.
The tech industry unfortunately screwed up a basic social contract<p>It is well-understood in every other industry - if you want to be at a prestigious firm, make top compensation, sit in a nice office, work with top-tier coworkers and enjoy excellent perks, you must hustle hard and be unreasonably competitive every day to continue reaping those benefits.<p>I'm not even talking about back-breaking work - this is true for law, medicine, financial services, entertainment, sports, academia, and everything else I can think of.<p>After a decade+ run of cheap money and strong demand for talent, returning to broader reality may feel very unfair for many. But that doesn't make it so
For some reason this sounds AI-written, especially this paragraph:<p>> Companies love to brag about their innovation, but the real innovation is finding new ways to make us disposable. Permanent employment? That’s for suckers. Why pay benefits and offer job security when they can churn through contractors and freelancers like cheap code? And don’t get me started on those non-compete clauses - designed to keep you locked down and terrified to make a move that might actually be good for your career.
Class consciousness is firmly in the zeitgeist: witness season 1 of Severance.<p>There is no going back from this, as once you are disillusioned it is much harder to be re-illusioned. There will be some sort of collective response by white-collar professionals at some point. I think people are ready for change.
Have there been successful general-software unions formed before? I see and hear this idea relatively frequently, but never past that.<p>I sort of feel like most people don't stay at a place long enough to get cohesion or see enough they don't want to stay in the first place, good people chase better job offers (and congratulate themselves for doing it on their own), less good may stick around longer because they can't move but also are more focused to just stay employed.<p>Software is also a <i>broad</i> industry in terms of the type of deliverable work (e.g. think buy-once software vs. SaaS vs. in-house industrial controls), skillsets, and environment. It's also hard for me to even conceive of what a typical fast-moving startup would look like full union. Lines between ownership and management and labor can get very blurred.<p>Is the best hope to look at things like the entertainment industry which are also extremely fluid, but have been very successful? Do we need a long-term period of dev salaries coming closer to median pay (which we might be entering now)? Do we need to better address the ageism monster?<p>The games industry recently made some real headway [1], which I applaud. Maybe focusing on smaller sectors is the right approach.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/industry-wide-union-uvw-cwa-has-already-welcomed-over-100-new-members" rel="nofollow">https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/industry-wide-union...</a>
I worked for 8 different companies over my 35 year career. Not once did I feel exploited and wanted a union to come to my rescue. But that is just my experience.
It’s weird that they reference alphabet workers union when specifically that union has done nothing for full time software engineers in its entire time.<p>Check out their wins:
<a href="https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/our-wins" rel="nofollow">https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/our-wins</a><p>Lots of references to contractors wins which I think are more important but the facts make the opposite point then the article is making.<p>The reason why software engineers won’t unionize in the US is because the US has weakened the power of unions so much.<p>There are already unions in Europe for Alphabet that have done things - the French union just outright rejected alphabets attempt to do layoffs.
The ideal is to encourage developers to start their own small businesses and support each other by being customers. That, and when you find success/profitability, don't sell to a big tech nightmare or PE—just run the business.<p>The "machine" is a natural side-effect of mega corporations and creating unions will just encourage more creativity around stealing your soul or getting rid of your entirely.
> It’s a meat grinder that chews up developers, sysadmins, and infosec pros<p>…and designers, and PMs, and sales and marketing and support and…<p>I know that, charitably, the point is that engineers often have higher leverage than other individual contributors at a tech company.<p>But the whole point of a union is to join together <i>employees</i> (as opposed to employers) for greater leverage. Don’t make your tent smaller for no reason!
I feel very fortunate to have worked other jobs before my first in tech. My last was hanging drywall and I will never forget how awful it was. I haven’t loved every part of every tech job I’ve worked, but I’ve always chosen to be there.<p>I think the author is missing perspective on what the alternatives are like, and seems to have a lack of agency when they say things like:<p>> How many of us have been forced to work on projects that make us sick to our stomachs - surveillance tech, data mining tools, algorithms that reinforce social biases - because we don’t have the power to say no?<p>There’s incredible mobility within tech - more so than almost any other industry. Vote with your feet! I’ve taken major pay cuts to have more choice over my work, and have never regretted it.
The nature of free market is competition. And the nature of competition is to get more profit out of less people. It means longer hours, more focus, less complaint, less life. You think new technology is gonna save the poor workers coz it boosts productivity? Only temporarily until everyone has it. Then It's the same game all over again, pushing out new features, new compaigns, re-org, transformation around the clock.<p>Once one player in the market starts to work the longer hours, it's guaranteed to spread to every corner. Coz you need to up the game and catch up with the competition.<p>Endless grind.
If history shows anything than it is that companies will abuse workers if there is no organization and legislation stopping them.<p>The fact that some get a good salary but way more get a bad one plus a lot of abuse should be a concern to all of us.<p>You may be lucky and sitting at a big company with nice stock options, a six figure salary. But: for every one of those there are many barely scraping by just making minimum wage, with no hope in sight<p>I wish the common consensus would be: yes, we should band together and fight for each other.
I absolutely support everyone's right and freedom to join a union, so long as it's not mandatory. (The couple of unions I was part of in my life, I didn't have a choice if I joined or not afaik) That freedom of choice is a fundamental good that must be respected.<p>Without agreeing that unions are the solution, I think I agree that there's certainly some big opportunities to close unfair gaps or disparities between W2 workers and other classes of self employment / businesses (in a very Tech + American centric perspective)<p>1. Insurances tied to employer, not just health, but also disability and life. IMO this is a major barrier to folks not working for the biggest company they can, it's a subtle form of bias towards direct employment, and by the biggest companies.<p>2. Retirement and other pretax benefits only (easily) available through w2 employment. IMO the tax benefits and vehicles for accumulating assets should be front loaded and universal... A bit like Canada's TFSA program which gives ~5K a year of tax sheltered investment. It's also a bit weird that certain classes of workers can claim a home office, but a WFH cannot, or can expense their tools, transportation, marketing etc, but W2s cannot... (Try and expense your Linkedin account when you're looking for a new job, that's marketing cost). IMO every employee should be ran as a small corporation that has revenue and expenses, and the IRS has very little say over what was or wasn't necessary for the purpose of maximizing revenue.
Just stop working more than 35-40 hours a week. If you get no bonus because of this action, that's not so bad. If you get let go because of it, the next one could be more tolerant. You are not a slave, so don't act like one.
I’ve only been in tech for 10 years but I’ve worked at companies of various sizes (FAANG, a 50-person startup, and now a mid-sized “unicorn”) and I’ve never had to work crazy hours. Maybe leading up to a launch I’d work past dinner occasionally but mostly my work weeks have been 40-45 hours consistently.<p>Am I just lucky? I mean obviously I’m lucky relative to the world (tech has been lucrative and interesting during this decade) but are others in tech really working crazy hours all the time?<p>I have worked with some people who seem to turn any job into a 24/7 thing but they were either workaholics or under-qualified people trying to substitute quantity for quality. And it did not seem to pay off for them.<p>I’ve always thought that San Francisco was a pretty laid back city. Working until 7 is “late”. My friends in NYC think that’s early.<p>I will say that I’ve always thought oncall as a concept is odd and somewhat exploitative. Only software engineers and doctors seem to carry pagers. And software engineers (mostly) don’t save lives.
How many tech jobs are 80 hours a week? My work life balance is pretty good at a smaller tech company, so is it the FAANG jobs expecting 80 hour weeks?
I would still rather be doing tech right now than anything else. Job market is not as good as it used to be, but it is still better than other work.<p>Honestly, I kind of only just scanned the article because it was clearly written by GPT.
> You know the pitch - beanbags in the office, free kombucha on tap, and "Agile" processes that are supposed to make everything more flexible, more efficient.<p>Does this still happen? This sounds kind of 2010.<p>What I find interesting about this page is how poorly written it is. It looks like a chimera of AI writing (bullet points) and someone on too much Adderall (…because that's happened to me). It's too long yet too short at once. I think the author should try reading it out loud to someone else.
No time like the present, and I know that the tech labor movement has been going on for a while, but it's a real shame that this idea didn't get more traction a few years ago at the peak of worker power.<p>LarryDarrell on July 8, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizin...<p>My worry is that without premature organization, the next recession is going to make the "tech worker shortage" a permanent thing of the past. We'll never have as much negotiating power as we do now.<p>If say there was a Tech Workers Union/Guild/Association, we might have been able to protect the older workers at IBM, or the outsourced workers at Disney. Maybe there could be a push back against open offices and poorly implemented Agile. As it is, we're just better compensated workers floating from job to better job.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384298">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384298</a>
Have been on both sides, running a company, and being an employee. Neither side is happy with current status-quo, but we're at some equilibrium.<p>How does this sound as new equilibrium: companies pay across board become around ~40%-50% less than it is today. Avg tenure and stability goes up ~2x what is today. Would we as an industry take this up?
The VC funded startup unicorn game is not helping the world. The paragraph on not being able to say no to questionable products is interesting. It's similar in structure at nations under a ruler. That said, we're not starving, so we might as well redirect our resources toward more useful for humans, society (and even the planet).
> demanding 80 hour weeks<p>IME, most of the people in tech who work extremely long hours have not actually had this "demanded" of them by anyone, and in fact either want to do it or have sort of hallucinated themselves into a corner where they (mostly incorrectly) believe that they will land in hot water if they don't work long hours.
i've enjoyed the fluidity of startup software work. have a job for a bit, it's exciting, the thing blows up or goes bust. get a new job. hire some other devs. have to fire them because out of cash (sorry, no hard feelings i hope). burning out? quit!<p>maybe i'm just in a fortunate enough position to be able to take risks, but i have no interest at all in unions, strikes, secret conversations that the article suggests. would be a mild red flag for hiring for me (expressing overt interest in unionizing). it has a hint of difficult to work with, politicising the workplace, power games.<p>i will say this though: talk about salaries with your colleagues (if you want)! employers have the deck stacked in their favour with this taboo and there is no good reason to uphold it afaiks as an employee. the more you all know the better position you are in. don't need a special club with dues and leaders for that
There should be a union for YC startups, to prevent them from being exploited so badly. By the time the startup meat grinder eventually peters out, the founders own almost nothing of a fairly worthless company and the employees even less. Meanwhile YC pimps the myth of the startup and cashes the winning lottery tickets.
From the article:<p>> Push for Ethics: Let’s make sure that any union platform we build isn’t just about wages and hours, but about ethics too. We need to have a say in what we’re building and how it’s used.<p>This was the most important part of the article for me.<p>I just passed the CISSP; and while studying for it, I was very impressed with how much emphasis ISC2 put on human safety/welfare, which is something that I feel like our industry is lacking more than ever lately.<p>From <a href="https://www.isc2.org/ethics" rel="nofollow">https://www.isc2.org/ethics</a> :<p>> Code of Ethics Preamble:<p>> The safety and welfare of society and the common good, duty to our principals, and duty to each other, require that we adhere, and be seen to adhere, to the highest ethical standards of behavior.
This will take a change of attitude. I entered the industry right around the dotcom bust, when people were still making the jump from their 9-to-5 for whatever big or small company to seeking angel investment and starting their own business. My observation early in my career regarding unions and software engineers was "The first step would be for software engineers to stop thinking their biggest impediment to greatness isn't management; it's the underperforming slacker in the next cube over holding all the 10x engineers back."<p>But I think that change is coming. Enough engineers have gotten burned (or been through the startup washing machine enough times) to suspect that the profession as a whole needs to be able to self-advocate.
Burnout? Yes. Overwork? Maybe. Unionize? Eh…<p>The post reeks of privilege.<p>Go work a manual labor job outside in the sun for a few weeks and tell me how bad tech employees have it. Most of non-tech America is not empathetic to our plights. They’ll probably cheer on the offshoring of our jobs.
That came across as a largely angry rant instead of a reasoned appeal. With decades in the tech industry I never experienced the kind of problems described. Mostly it's been a lot of fun.
You can just do things, like quitting and starting your own company instead of trying to convince a hostile company to unionize which is not a cure to any of these malaise style issues
> You know the pitch - beanbags in the office, free kombucha on tap, and "Agile" processes that are supposed to make everything more flexible, more efficient<p>No offense, but was this written a decade ago? All of that stuff is long, long gone.<p>> demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion."<p>Not my experience at all. From startups to big tech/FAANG, silicon valley and otherwise. Never been asked for an 80 hour week, nor seen anyone work one. I can count on one hand the times that a manager has explicitly asked me to work late in the 16 years I've been doing this professionally.<p>> If you’re not pulling all-nighters, you’re "not committed."<p>Not reality.<p>> If you’re not answering Slack messages at midnight, you’re "not a team player."<p>Not reality.<p>> This culture is toxic, and it’s only getting worse.<p>By what measure?<p>> this industry is not your friend. It’s a machine, and unless we start organizing, it’s going to keep grinding us down. It’s time to talk about unionizing tech jobs.<p>And yet, I'm still all for this. I just don't appreciate the silly hyperbole about the state of the world.
Maybe this isn’t an article designed for “me”, but there is a sizable workforce of people who aren’t getting paid super high salaries for super high responsibilities.<p>I’m talking about the hourly tech employee. The customer support call center agent. The HVAC technician. The on-the-go consultant. Yes, it’s not glamorous, but it’s reliable, it not stressful, and it still has good benefits.
" the tech industry loves to sell us on the myth of the "dream job." You know the pitch - beanbags in the office, free kombucha on tap, and "Agile" processes that are supposed to make everything more flexible, more efficient."<p>Never seen that. I'll also bet vast majority of tech workers have never seen that either.
Unionizing is always a good idea, but unions can be a complicit joke.<p>A "no strike" clause is a big red flag that its not gonna do anything .<p>And organizing is a good way to get fired. Employers don't care - they won't get caught or prosecuted and if fined it will be after the critical organizers are long gone.<p>It takes some next level leadership to make it work that is mostly missing
Perhaps another reason to unionize is to claim more of the political power being wielded by our industry. Unions can play a role in shifting where lobbying money goes, how industry advises politicians, etc. At least I think that’s how things used to work. Not sure how anything works anymore…
personal theory: burnout is basically when you're expending more energy than than you're able to recover during rest -- over chronic timelines. that is, i think getting physical health right addresses many causes of burnout. getting your device and app use right addresses a set of others. finding ways to connect with your team, users, company mission addresses other potential problems; ie feeling alienated and on a futile or harmful mission is a great way to get burned out.<p>wrote about some of this here: <a href="https://vonnik.substack.com/p/state-changes-work-and-presence" rel="nofollow">https://vonnik.substack.com/p/state-changes-work-and-presenc...</a>
How do you then compete with companies from other geographies willing to overwork US companies? Sounds great on the surface, but if you slow down the treadmill too much, you risk falling off completely.
I'm generally in favor of unions, but I don't understand the game theory under which an L3 up to L8 (for example) have enough in common that they would be a single bargaining block.<p>Compensation and authority scale up pretty quickly in large tech companies. Also, much of that compensation is in stock, which makes the tech workers capitalists. I'm skeptical that you're going to encourage unionization by telling people they're evil for owning capital.<p>So if the goal is collective bargaining power you first have to figure out what mechanisms need to be in place if L3 and L<N> have diverging interests. Then you need to figure out if waging a 19th century holy war against capital is important, in which case you have to make a case for why tech workers should give up the ability to be compensated by shares.<p>Also if you want people to come together, maybe stop trying to bully them? Some of the comments on this thread are really beyond the pale.
Ran this through few AI checkers and they all flagged this as highly likely written by AI. Surprised to see it passed the sniff test for users on HN enough so to make it to the front page.<p>Sure AI gen can be hard to detect but for the most common models it’s easy to detect. I would hope HN has a way in the future to filter out clear AI generated blogs. HN has been an oasis to get away from bot spam and AI slop.
There is nothing wrong with unions, but they are a response to an imbalance in bargaining power. In places with lots of smaller employers, there is much less benefit.
What happens when your employer replaces union workers w/ more pliant immigrants on visas? Or just outsources their work entirely?<p>Are you going to picket an AWS DC in Ashburn?
This seems overly-catastrophizing to me. I don't deny it rings true for many, but I think some of the statements here really depend on your team and company.
> billionaires at the top<p>Peter Turchin's research indicates this is not a good description of where the lines are. The elites are roughly the top ten percent and represent an important barrier. Billionaires are involved, but elites as a whole are more numerous and closer to the steep, stark social cliff face that defines the abyss.
Because you can code, gold should flow copiously into your coffers and the masses should genuflect to our awesomeness.<p>Or, it can be like everything other job, and not so much.<p>Ad tech has given developers the illusion they are extremely valuable.<p>They are, but not that much. Not by a long shot. Google et al massively distorted the software development market by at least 4x, if not more.<p>What we are seeing now is a massive correction back to some level of sanity for tech worker comp.
> We’re living in a world where billion dollar tech companies expect us to live and breathe code, demanding 80 hour weeks under the guise of "passion." And what do we get in return? Burnout, anxiety, and the constant threat of layoffs.<p>..apart from 6- or 7-figure pay, a chance to hit it real big, and to built things that everybody uses? and this for job positions that 40-years ago commanded an average salary, because the latest React is not rocket science.<p>Reminds me of "apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
As an outsider, I'm astounded why workers aren't unionizing to a much higher degree. It's been proven to work [1] against the misinformation, discord, and wealth inequality that companies will, inevitably, cause. Despite the small union fee, the individual clearly stands to benefit[1]. Is it because people are cheap? Or not familiar with history? You'd think that tech workers were quite informed.<p>[1]: <a href="https://nordics.info/show/artikel/trade-unions-in-the-nordic-region/" rel="nofollow">https://nordics.info/show/artikel/trade-unions-in-the-nordic...</a>
There's a bit of strawman going on where for example when author says "Not taking 12am slacks makes you not a team player". Never in my life have I heard that one.<p>Also, anecdotal perspective: I've been private company and academia for my whole life, and I've been with good and bad companies over time. If I had a union earlier in life, I think I would have benefited a lot. I don't think a union could make my current situation any better though. (Again, anecdotal)
Why does this AI-generated article have 400 upvotes? The conversation here is valuable, but surely we could find a human article to have it under instead?
> The tech industry loves to hype itself as a meritocracy, where the best and the brightest rise to the top. But in reality, it’s a meat market. As soon as you’re not "on the cutting edge," you’re out.<p>I’m not really understanding the distinction.
I feel like these calls to unionize aren't trying to improve working conditions for tech workers, they're just trying to find ways to politically capture tech companies<p>That's why, you know, most of the people who call to unionize are left wing progressives who don't work in tech (and a large number in the bay area resent the shit out of tech)<p>Frankly given their attitudes towards meritocracy, "social justice", etc, I don't really trust these groups to actually negotiate a better deal for me. I'd expect them to just use the leverage I give them to screw me over. Go on Alphabet Workers Union's website and this is the exact shit you'll see<p>They probably target tech specifically because they think we aren't "class conscious" enough to understand our own situation. That's why they don't go and bother the finance industry, those guys know where they're sitting economically