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Comment by npteljes | Hacker News Reader

Carteling doesn't work bottom-up. When changes begin (like this one with AI), one of the things an individual can do is to change course as fast as they can. There are other strategies as well, not evolving is also one, but some strategies yield better results than others. Not keeping up just worsens the chances, I have found.

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It does when it is called unionizing, however for some reason software developers have a mental block towards the concept.

I would be much more in favor of them as a software developer if I felt the qualifications of other software developers were reliable. But they never have been, and today it’s worse than ever. So I think it’s important to weed some of that out before we start talking about making it harder to fire people.

You're doing your boss's job for them by making this an engineer vs engineer thing instead of an engineer vs management thing.

No, today I can tell my manager when someone sucks at their job, and if enough other people are saying the same thing then that engineer will either be given help so they stop sucking or be fired so they don’t subtract from the team. Because this happens fairly often I wouldn’t want to add a lot of friction to that process. Idk, maybe you can protect people from being laid off without also complicating performance-based firings.

How does a union have an effect on what you described? Can't a union worker not be fired for poor performance?

Unions make it harder because you actually have to document the poor performance in order to show you’re complying with the rules. It effectively makes the cost of firing (and thus, hiring) higher.

Seems that aiming twice and shooting once is a good thing when the cost of a miss is destabilizing someones entire personal life for their entire family potentially

I fail to see the issue with that as well.

The sentiment I often see online is that "fewer rules = more freedom". And as I grew more experienced, I find that the opposite is true. In a lot of cases, freedom is upheld by the rules themselves. And this is not an orwellian "war is peace" kind of thing, but rather a GNU Free Software kind of thing, where the perpetuity of the freedom is guaranteed with the rules of participation.

I think that this discussion went in the same direction with the unions. But, of course, freedom in itself can have different interpretations for different people.

If you know of a reliable way to do this then you should go sell it right now, because nobody in tech has figured this out yet.

The reason might be that union members give a percentage of their income to a governing body which is barely distinct from organized crime in which they have no say in. The federal government already exists. You really want more boots on your neck?

I kinda agree with you, more boots is not really an ideal way to achieve this. Worker protections should come from the government itself, so much so that there is no need to form unions, like how it is at many places in Europe. I don't see how that could be created in the US though. I think trade unions are more their vibe - or not even that, of course, like in case with you. And of course, in US history we can see how some organization grow and get a life on their own, like the NRA. Not necessarily remaining on the path to protect past principles, or the welfare of the people.

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