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Comment by ivraatiems | Hacker News Reader

Good, and I wish them luck. The practices that companies are willing to engage in to prevent unionization are cartoonishly evil.

The best part is that they could have avoided all of this by paying their QA more for fewer hours. The changes they'll likely be forced to make by a union are probably much more dramatic than what they could have quashed pro-union sentiment by simply introducing themselves. Put another way: As an engineer, I have a great salary, good stock options, and decent hours. I favor unions in principle but don't have a drive to force my company to set one up because I am not so poorly treated that I think I need it. Why not treat QA the same way?

The exploitative practices that some in tech - especially the games industry - are exposed to are a long-term bet that those people won't mind being exploited and won't be convinced they can do better. It's a shame that bet pays off as often as it does.

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> The practices that companies are willing to engage in to prevent unionization are cartoonishly evil.

Yesterday, after a Chipotle in Maine became the first location to vote to unionize, corporate decided it would rather shutter the store than risk giving anyone else any bright ideas. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Honestly, I don't even particularly like the idea in principle of adding another layer of bureaucracy to any organization. I would rather have a country where strong labor laws made unions unnecessary. But it's plain to see that these companies need internal opposition in order to stay honest.

Not quite a balanced representation of what happened. The store had been closed for a month due to an inability to hire people. Washington Post article has fuller explanation of both sides - https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/20/chipotle-...

That link is paywalled for me, here's one that's not, which claims that the location had "about 20" employees: https://www.boston.com/news/business/2022/07/19/chipotle-clo...

To see whether 20 is a low number, I searched for how many employees an average Chipotle branch has, which brings up this page (from 2018), where multiple commenters leave estimates that all hover around 20: https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Chipotle-Mexican-Grill/faq/how-ma...

Regardless of how close it is to the target staffing: was it open (and presumably operational at some level of customer satisfaction) or closed at the time it was shut down? What does it mean to have 20 employees but closed for a month? Wouldn't those employees be seeking other employment already?

We can also ask, was the store closed for a month in an attempt to force out the union-sympathizing employees? Does the fact that it still has 20 employees after a month of closure suggest there were even more employees a month ago? The last time the store opened was on June 17th, and the vote to unionize was held June 23rd. All that upstairs needs to do is not send a manager with the keys.

The gist of the Washington Post article is they could not hire sufficient staff for the store. They dedicated two recruiters to the task and were still unsuccessful. For the staff they did have, there was "excessive call outs and lack of availability..." I do not have any facts beyond the article, but would not surprise me that an understaffed store (described as in a remote location) would enter a downward spiral that leads to a shut down.

The company representative described it as remote. The journalist described it as in a strip mall just off the highway in Augusta. Augusta is the capital.

It would not surprise me if the store couldn't hire workers because of a reputation for poor working conditions. It would not surprise me if call outs and lack of availability were proportional to excessive call ins from an under staffed store.

Isn't it kind of weird that a Bezos owned media outlet is publishing an anti-union argument? "There's two sides to the story" falls apart when your siding with Corporate over Fast Food workers.

I did not get the impression that the article was "siding with Corporate over Fast Food workers". Can you quote the sections of the article that made you think differently?

Are you familiar with the economics of the store? Maybe they were having a hard time staying afloat anyway. Augusta, ME has a population of like 15k - my city of 100k(with 20k college students) only has 1 Chipotle.

I'd imagine that locations which are struggling to hire would be correlated with disaffected employees looking to unionize.

Countries with strong labour laws also have strong unions. Their existence is precisely the reason why such labour laws exist. It's a matter of power balance, and laws swing the way power is.

Spoiler: the labor laws create their own layer of bureucracy. Companies have to hire extra people to observe these laws. There have to be lawyers and courts which specialize in those laws. These laws are inefficient and get in the way on many occassions (i.e. both employer and employee would rather not have them), but you're still required to observe them. You can't make things more regulated without making it more rigid and inefficient at the same time.

That's.... All in order, no? If workers want to be able to not be abused, they need to collectively bargain. Which, adds extra steps. But necessary ones? What am I missing?

Negotiating your salary on an individual basis is common sense yet when put in the context of collective bargaining suddenly it's "extra steps" and "bureaucracy". Despite the fact that once you're in the job your employer rarely even gives you an opportunity to renegotiate the terms of your employment.

Negotiating your own salary is negotiating from a point of weakness though?

The company decides whether you eat or not, and you can't live long without eating

You know, laws in general get in the way. You need to understand them, hire extra people to observe them. We need lawyers and courts. The laws are inefficient if not just straight up outdated, but you're still required to observe them.

Well, tell employers not to screw people over and we wouldn't have to have the laws.

We hear the same line of BS about environmental laws, that they make things less efficient, yet the places that have them are objectively better.

Flexibility and efficiency are not the only goals worth pursuing.

Yeah, based on my industry experience I am convinced it is not a coincidence that we're seeing games QA teams unionizing in particular. The QA department always is mistreated by management (and often other developers) and they're typically overworked contractors or temps who are at constant risk of being fired so they can't push back on mistreatment.

Games don't get shipped in a quality state on time without the hard work of skilled QA testers but the industry really treats them like they're disposable. Game design and game programming are both MUCH easier if you can rely on a good QA tester to spot issues and help you figure out reproduction steps, etc.

We had one netcode bug in Guild Wars that haunted us for at least 6 months (probably longer?) that players would frequently report but we never managed to find a reliable repro for, despite having extensive server-side logging. One of our best QA testers spent an hour or two every day trying to find a repro case and eventually was able to hand it to a lead to be fixed - something like that simply isn't possible unless you put skilled people in an environment where they can do focused, specialist work like that. (Sadly, that studio - ArenaNet - also had a tendency to mistreat QA staff and it got worse and worse over time.)

That tester ended up going on to be a design lead on multiple big AAA titles at other studios, so it was nice to see him get the recognition he deserved for his work ethic and skill.

I find it staggering that there exist companies where they don't value their QA people. As far as I'm concerned, QA is one of the most important roles on a development team. I've had meetings with higher ups where I told them we need to get our QA on the call to voice their opinion or the conversation in question can't proceed. The ability to systematically and reproduceably break things in ways that nobody else thought of is a powerful skill, and should not be overlooked.

> That tester ended up going on to be a design lead on multiple big AAA titles at other studios, so it was nice to see him get the recognition he deserved for his work ethic and skill.

If the best people in a given job always choose the leave if given the chance, then it will always suck to do the job. Custom service, qa, warehouse workers. These are all jobs that need to get done. But if anyone with the skill and drive to do something else leaves, then you are left with people who are abused because they are stuck and powerless. How many people dream of doing Video Game QA? I doubt very many. They only do it because they cannot program/draw/write/etc.

The gaming industry has it particularly bad. The industry is high risk. Like any type of software but gaming is a very competitive market in addition. Like the rest of the entertainment industry it really makes dependable employment more difficult. It only works as long as you manage to produce successful titles.

That said, a company the size of Blizzard should be able to pay decent wages for QA. I don't know how it is today but older Blizzard games had excellent QA and their products were very polished compared to the rest of the market and they were recognized by that. So trying to save a few bucks in this department is negligent management and should immediately be stopped as it would undermine their successful strategy.

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