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Comment by maximente | Hacker News Reader

"divided we fall" is a cliche but may have some merit here, especially if this will be filled by another starry eyed immigrant visa holder who can be treated as such. the information asymmetry gap is just too high imo.

there's other opportunities for organizing labor that don't include old-school unions. screen actors' guild is one example that, e.g., mandates various "newer" members get roles on films and seems to be really well regarded. a guild could serve techies as well.

read up on some of michael o church's old blog about his ideas about organized labor in tech, but be careful espousing the same views as it very well might get you into irredeemable trouble.

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Getting to be a new member of SAG is almost impossible. I don't think we want that model for developers.

Agreed. But the fight to keep management in check shouldn't devolve into a fight to keep the union leaders in check. What's the guarantee that won't happen?

i don't know, my first reaction is introduce democratic elements to the system as opposed to seniority but perhaps that's been done.

"worst system but best we've had" and all that - at least labor would have a fighting chance

> i don't know, my first reaction is introduce democratic elements to the system as opposed to seniority

Unions are almost invariably democratic; where seniority rules are adopted by a union (and this is far from universal), they tend to be adopted democratically,and not to replace democratic control of the union, so these are not opposed concepts.

> screen actors' guild is one example that, e.g., mandates various "newer" members get roles on films and seems to be really well regarded. a guild could serve techies as well.

But does the profession of acting strive to be meritocratic as much as software development? It appears that fame (which is probably correlated with how good of an actor someone is, but probably only weakly) has a much bigger effect in acting.

They both seem to pay a lot of lip service while the reality greatly undermines the verbiage. I’d argue that in acting the representation of women is far better than in software development. The degree to which software development is an asocial boy’s club is hard to understate, and the pet theories about intelligence and genetics don’t help, but rather reinforce the farcical nature of the self-serving “meritocracy” narrative.

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