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Comment by abj | Hacker News Reader

I agree, I avoided using the word union.

In an ideal world, this would be a union.

In (what I worry might be) the real world, the word union conjures unhelpful barriers to action.

I'm less interested in fighting idealogical battles. I'm more interested in achieving a practical goal - getting a large group of people to say no to leetcode.

My guess is more people will say no to leetcode if they think of it as a general group anyone can join. This allows a larger amount of people to ignore idealogical barriers they might have to joining. So for now it's a "group/job board".

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To be blunt, most of my observations of traditional unions have given me the impression that they prevent the hardest workers from advancing and protect mediocre workers who do the bare minimum. The incentives appear to create a negative work environment for those who do want to excel, even in traditional union careers such as teaching and nursing.

I agree with you that the trend of asking Leetcode (or any rote-learning) style problems hurts candidates. I have no moral problem with software engineers bargaining collectively to reverse a trend that is harmful to the industry.

That being said, I think there is a tendency for organizations created around a cause to find themselves rudderless when that cause is finally achieved. The urge to not disband and instead look for another cause is often too strong, even if they don't feel quite as strongly about the new cause.

I genuinely would like to know how traditional unions obtained their negative stigma. My guess is they were started with equally noble aims.

A union that disincentivizes leetcode problems will reduce the ability of candidates who are best at rote-memorization problems to advance while protecting the ones who are mediocre at rote-memorization problems.

In this case it happens that people who are good at rote-memorization problems probably aren't the best people to lead the industry. But the union doesn't exist to serve the industry, it exists to protect the people working in it.

In an ideal world the HR department would be considerate of every employee's needs and there would be no need for unions. But in practice the incentive structure of the HR department doesn't allow that, so you need a competing incentive structure to balance things out (the union). Neither can achieve the goal perfectly on their own.

> getting a large group of people to say no to leetcode.

I assume you mean LC to be a stand-in for the types of interviews that focus on LC-style questions? LC didn't invent these and they're certainly not to blame when companies ask senior SWE candidates to invert binary trees.

That's a great point - LC didn't invent binary tree questions. Leetcode might be the wrong term to use.

Is there another, more general term I could use? I'm looking for a term that would be as clear to as most people as possible.

I'm not aware of one. I've always said LC-style interviews.

I don't think LC is entirely useless, I've seen people graduate with CS degrees but couldn't do fizzbuzz. But the prominence of it for certain interviews is frustrating in many cases.

In the EU unions are not as tainted as in the US, but we still have neoliberals on the right, and 'progressives' on the left, both clamoring individualism for their own agendas.

There is no solidarity left : earlier this year my country ( NL ) threw all elderly under the bus ( we have no room for you on intensive care ).

You know what happened? They got scared. That was all.

I remember the 80ties : all unions would have united and the entire country would have revolted.

Many Unions in the US have a good standing (Teachers, Police, Nurses), some circles have been brainwashed by corporate propaganda that they are all horrible.

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