This of course isn’t a problem for HN posters, who are all 10x engineers or w/e.
Overall though, not having a contract, recourse and representation in a large company is a pretty big risk factor unless you just toil away in silence.
Overall though, not having a contract, recourse and representation in a large company is a pretty big risk factor unless you just toil away in silence.
Why? I have an in-demand set of skills and could easily find a new job if I wanted to.
I'd much rather negotiate directly with my employer than have a union intermediating that relationship. If anything, it feels far riskier to have a politically-motivated union boss control my employment.
Prior to covid, HN basically constantly complained about the dearth of fully-remote positions. Yes, you could get another office job but if you wanted something fully-remote there was only a teeny tiny number of possible companies. Could unions have forced employers to offer this option?
Today, people complain about pay being based on location for fully remote work. Perhaps a union could actually achieve the goal of making your pay unrelated to where you live?
Let's imagine someone makes an AI project that can turn requirements into code, and it actually works. Copilot has shown it's not impossible to generate working code with some machine learning but it's definitely a hard problem. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of founders working on this problem right now and maybe one will get lucky.
How long do you think you will be in demand for? Years? Months? Less? Perhaps you'll be fine because you actually define the requirements. Or you're in a job where the AI can't replace you. It would replace a lot of people working in the simple CRUD app end of the dev industry though, and that means pressure to keep wages up would fall away fast if there are more devs than dev jobs. You wouldn't get a raise if there are 20 devs who'd jump in to your role for less money if you left. You couldn't negotiate better terms. If you left you'd be competing with lots of others which puts more downward pressure on your salary.
That's one vaguely plausible scenario of how things might change in the next 10 years. There are many more. Right now devs are very well paid but we should all recognize that for what it is - an opportunity for industry disruption. Our salaries are (partly) lost profit. Companies don't want to pay us as much as they do; they pay market rates because they have to. If a company can reduce that cost by lowering wages or lowering headcount every tech employer is going to jump on the opportunity. Founders out there know this is a pain point, and they're working on solving it.
Maybe having a union for devs would actually be useful if that ever happens.
(FWIW technological change reducing manpower requirements has been a massive driving force behind unionization in many other industries. The scenario is sound even if the "AI writes your code now" bit is a little fantastical.)
It is terrible to hold back progress just to provide "make-work" jobs protected by unions. Should we still employ elevator operators?
In a scenario where my job is obsolete, a union would simply delay the inevitable. It might keep the company from replacing me with an AI, but the company would therefore eventually fail to competitors who could. In the meantime, the union would make people miserable and delay progress.
For what it's worth, I completely agree that developer jobs are on their way towards automation. Instead of trying to fight that trend with unionization, I focus on being part of it (building automation tools) and building a capital base.
Yes, which is the difference between having the time to offboard from your current career and do something else instead of being chucked out overnight and losing your house and everything else, multiplied by all the lost developer jobs.
Imagine the cost of that in the Bay Area. It'd be catastrophic to the entire region.
Slowing progress down a little can be a positive thing.
That's what savings are for.
> Imagine the cost of that in the Bay Area. It'd be catastrophic to the entire region.
It would be a much-needed correction.
I don't want unions slowing down progress.
Improvements to tech results in better - even if there's some temporary disruption to people as they are made redundant by the tech.
And it's not as if you cannot prepare - use the excess earnings that a software engineer earns today to invest and own a piece of that future productivity.
There is an abstract goal of human potential I have. I don’t want you protecting my job and stealing the future from mankind. No. If you can do my job better with a machine, then so be it.
What's the union supposed to do for me in this scenario? Stop the march of progress to protect my job? No, thanks.
Unions are the reason why eg the NYC subway is so uniquely bad, for basically exactly the reasons you outlined. They oppose almost labour saving technology.
> [...] they pay market rates because they have to. If a company can reduce that cost by lowering wages or lowering headcount every tech employer is going to jump on the opportunity. Founders out there know this is a pain point, and they're working on solving it.
Yes, obviously. That's how progress works. Higher productivity makes economies richer. Competition makes sure to distribute the riches. (Add some government-led redistribution via taxes and welfare, if you feel like it.)
Developers can't turn requirements into code. Whole teams and companies struggle mightily to turn a partially-understood subset of the requirements into buggy code.
You would need full AGI, possibly superhuman in capabilities, to "turn requirements into code". At that point, suggesting you want a union to protect you from the Singularity... I don't know.
Just for complete transparency, I’m still an enterprise dev writing CRUD apps. I now use “boto3” and write a shit ton of yaml and I am a “consultant”.