Comment by killface | Hacker News Reader

Comment by killface | Hacker News Reader

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I think the reason we haven't is many-fold:

- We all believe we're above average in our field, and unions would hold us back.

- We all know people who have skated by on incompetence, and wouldn't want a union to protect their jobs.

- Our field moves quickly, and we don't want a union that would hamper our ability to make quick moves.

- Union is a dirty word, especially when the mind disease of libertarianism is more prevalent among tech workers.

I think the easier way to solve this is for IT/computer workers to stop being paid salaries, and get paid hourly. If it weren't for a special exemption from congress that was passed in the 90s, we would be paid hourly as a matter of law. I know I've been treated MUCH better since I switched to consulting.

Employers value your time when they have to pay for those extra 2 hours of meetings each day, when they have you work a Saturday, or stay a couple hours late to push to the finish line. In addition, things like software efficiency upgrades where I can show 10 hour savings for 3 hours of cost are suddenly on the table, where on a salary you're not a "team player" if don't just put in the extra hours for free to save the company some bucks.

>I know I've been treated MUCH better since I switched to consulting.

This has been my experience as well. My time was considered more valuable, people respected my input and expertise more, I was treated with more courtesy. The works.

Isn't that funny? You could be the same person with the same experience as you had in a company somewhere, and in one place it's undervalued and in a new place it's fairly valued (hopefully).

I've seen it in the same company. At a previous employer I trippled the hourly rate and was amazed at how the same customers treated me completely differently.

These customers seemed to be valuing my time by how much they paid for it.

I had less experience then than I do now, despite that, still had a better run of it.

Maybe I was just better at picking my work when I was a consultant. Hard to tell.

I don't want to weigh in on the union issue, but those last two paragraphs are spot on. I worked for IBM as a contractor a number of times and you are describing exactly the differences between those of us who were hourly and the salaried regular employees.

On the other hand, I wouldn't recommend working for IBM at all; there are reasons my resume reads like a list of major software project disasters of the '90's and it has a suspicious dearth of shipping products.

I think it's mostly the first one. I've met a lot of people with huge egos who think they are above the problems, and so far there is enough work. Someday, though, that might change, who knows when, though.

My grandfather was an aeronautical engineer who spent most of his career at one company - he joined early enough that he was friendly with the founder. That didn't stop them from laying him off right before he would have been able to collect his pension. (They did this with their other older engineers as well). This was around the end of the cold war when that whole sector was shrinking.

Say what you will about unions, but they do exist for a reason.

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