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Comment by nrook | Hacker News Reader

The tide is turning; tech owners are attempting to curtail the high costs of labor in the software industry.

The only way for labor to fight back is to stand together and form a union.

I don't want to sound unsympathetic, but a lot of these companies massively over hired over the last couple of years. While others were losing their jobs during the pandemic tech employees were in higher demand than ever. In fact, I'd argue the demand for tech workers has been so high over the last couple of years that a lot of people who really shouldn't have got a job based on their experience were able to do so.

I'd also note that the severance packages most tech companies have been offering their employees have been very fair, and with tech skills being almost universally valuable across industries it's not hard for good tech workers to quickly find tech jobs if they're happy to work outside of the tech sector.

If people want to form a union then fine, but I'm not sure what you expect. Spotify isn't profitable. With the cost of capital rising and a potential recession looming they obviously need to be financially cautious otherwise everyone at the company will eventually lose their job.

There's another way to look at it, though.

Without unions, employees are disposable. Companies hire them when money is plentiful and throw them away when it's convenient. It clearly benefits the employers and investors to operate that way.

With a union, employees aren't so dispensable, and companies have to take a longer term view when hiring because they can't get rid of employees on a whim. Despite being more stable for everybody, it's extra difficulty for the company and it balances out their power over employees.

> companies have to take a longer term view when hiring because they can't get rid of employees on a whim

that would make it harder to find a new job, right? tradeoffs to consider

Yup. Hard to fire = hard to hire. Why should an employer take a chance on hiring you, if in case it doesn't work out, they need to spend considerable time and money to fire you?

You don’t need a union. It’s enough to have a long notice period required by law.

It's a meme at this point that Google is probably developing 5 new chat apps to replace the 10 they recently killed. But then everyone gets up in arms when Google trims it's workforce by 6%, one which as grown by 100+% since 2016. If everyone wasn't looking for anything to signal 'recession!', no one would bat an eye at these big tech companies doing small staffing course corrections.

this misguided and only purpose it serve to make these company die sooner.

Main problem these company took benefit of cheap interest rates and overhired. hiring for promotion and ego. hiring not sake of true business growth.

Saw entire teams and orgs at two big tech companies sitting idle..senior and staff engineers have no commit in over a year. ok..maybe they doing design work or something else to drive efficiency or cross org optimization.

but no, even college level hires have no commit or other meaningful work. reasonable question: what they do? especially when team own no critical service and even have no support burden..why 7 engineers plus 3 managers?

meanwhile managers getting increasing hc and fighting territory battle.

this was massive grift. a union only make the grift last longer. real solution: remove dead weight.. massive bureaucracy..go back to entreprenurial root of company and what it vision.

I'm not sure that collective bargaining would be helpful for most tech workers -- there's such a large diversity in individual skills and productivity that negotiating for yourself seems to make more sense.

Moreso than professional sports or actors?

Unions often have coasters and quiet quitters. As an experienced developer I would never work with people like that.

you'd rather work harder and for less money than work with people who phone it in?

I don't really buy the meritocracy argument that 'good devs get paid more'. It hasn't really panned out in my experience, except for less than 1%, probably closer to .1% of devs who are really, truly exceptional AND will fight aggressively for their keep.

I would rather, yes. Working with people who phone it in means my projects will unpredictably grind to a halt for weeks, and getting them to work at all requires an obnoxious and overbearing management style that I really don't enjoy being around. I don't think it's wrong to be a "phone it in" person, they're just trying to earn a living so they can focus on what they care about, but that doesn't mean I want to work with them.

I don’t want to work with people who consistently let me down nor would I want to work with jerks.

Well, that's rather obvious, isn't it? I prefer working in smaller organizations. Growth there is a factor of personal growth and the company succeeding strongly enough that you have something bigger to grow into. It's not enough for me to work for $x for 2 years, have the company go under, and then go work somewhere else for $x for another 2 years, rinse and repeat with some number of coasters killing off firms.

I want what I got: company goes through hyper-growth and my own personal growth has some meaty problems to latch onto so I can apply myself. You can put my Ducati on a frozen lake and it's not going anywhere. Powerful engine wasted on frictionless surface. What I got when I was young was that if I applied myself I got better. And the company got better around me. And that meant I got bigger responsibilities which I could actually do.

Plus the obvious factor that I want my peer group as bought in as I am. My morale is high. Every idea I bounce off gets improved. Mistakes I'd make are caught. I am improved tenfold.

Reminder that “quiet quitting” is a term for people who do what they have been asked to do by their position. It’s a smear-word for a good thing.

Outside the US, labour costs are already quite low though.

Although I agree, they're going to get even lower. To quote Neal Stephenson:

> the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity

unionization is one thing, but i think i'd prefer to just do away with the conflict of interest (between owner/manager/employee) from the get-go and push for more employee-owned businesses instead

Isn’t it possible that the high costs just aren’t sustainable for businesses that just don’t make any money?

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