Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union (opens in new tab)

If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified, and that is simply the price everyone involved must pay to maintain equilibrium.

I think there's a false perception that unions negotiate against the companies best interest.

Unions negotiate for a bigger slice of the same pie against leadership, executives, and shareholders/owners.

They have the same incentives as those to see the pie grow, but band together to negotiate that their pie be bigger and those of the above smaller than what would have been otherwise.

Most of the time when it results in squeezing the company itself it's because leadership wasn't willing to share downsides.

And this is the primary reason for unions. When things go well, leadership is rarely willing to share upsides. When things go bad, leadership is often unwilling to share downsides. Workers join union to pressure leadership in sharing both upsides and downsides.

They got ... $700 million bailout from the government and put part of the blame on not being able to secure a $50 million benefits package?

Yellow was in massive debt due to poor management decisions and the union fought against a move that would have combined driver seniority lists from various companies they managed, which they suspected was going to be used to cut people's jobs .

The union did what it thought was best for all its members, and the company was in so much debt it couldn't figure out how to fulfill those needs another way.

This is not a "see unions are bad" example.

There is always a chance that management's misguided choices impact the business too heavily and drive the company under or at least greatly decrease the value of their output.

Yeah, it was the Unionization that did them, not the fact they were running a poorly-organized, filthy, low-morale operation…

Yes, because companies never go out of business or kill products for no reason under our glorious people's free market. Google, famously, never ends good products for no reason.

Since that harms the union members the it wouldn't make sense for them to do that intentionally.

I don't think workers are to blame when it the business who makes the deals both with the employees and other business.

If I make a series of bad deals running my company and my employees take up collection action to demand a reasonable market rate increase in pay my business didn't fail because of collective action. It failed because I failed as ab businessman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Corporation#cite_note-W...

There are movie flops, yet also there is an actors union. Workers are allowed to be paid even if management makes bad decisions. The company can go bankrupt, doesn't mean workers shouldn't get paid.

I wasn't aware that id software made Concorde.

Unpopular opinion but I'm okay with treating union members better than non.

It's good to know that once you make it you are safe. It's okay to grind and give 110% on the come-up. Unsustainable drive, passion, fire. But there has got to be a point where you can ease off to giving 90%, even 85%.

Jobs are a part of society, and the society needs to create structures that make room for people to pull back and focus on other things like raising a family.

What happened to it? Last time I heard only good things about those guys, but that was around the release of DOOM in 2016.

Actually a lot of people are saying that. Almost everyone except for those very few people and the bubble/membrane in their orbit.

Companies are doing amazingly well by any metric. They just refuse to share with their employees.

But sometimes that's the goal.

In professional sports, the player's union helps raise athlete salaries and improve working conditions and that does ultimately come out of the owner's pockets.

Easy counterexample: safety. Unions have historically been on the forefront of safety improvements. Not having workers mutilated or killed -> increased wealth for all. That's not a zero-sum game.

And if you think this doesn't matter for game programmers, look at how many overworked people in the past few years have gotten in car crashes while driving home. Fatigue kills.

TDA was so good timing the parrying. Eternal too, once you play these games the other games are slow in comparison imo.

Being forced to join the union to have a job there is little different from being forced to become an employee of the company in order to work in the store. It's extremely common to have a requirement to become part of some organization in order to work in a place, it's just that this organization is usually a for-profit business, and typically you only have to join one.

People think very weirdly about unions. If you strip away all the fluff, a union is ultimately a business that sells labor, typically with a setup where the buyer(s) of that labor pay the labor directly, and then the labor pays the supplier, rather than having the money flow through the supplier first. The direction of money flow is unusual, but makes no practical difference.

All you're describing is an exclusive arrangement between a supplier and a business that buys from them. If it was a contracting agency instead of a union, and your family member was told that the only way to work in the store was to go through the agency, you wouldn't bat an eye. But call it a "union" and suddenly "he got squeezed."

I generally agree with this take. Some specific unions, especially in the US, seem unnecessarily adversarial to employers, but others are known primarily for upholding professional and safety standards (I'm thinking of electricians we contracted with at a previous job).

How was my comment dishonest?

I think you can have a nuanced view on immigration.

I'm fairly pro-immigration but I think the current immigration system in the US is highly exploitive to just about everyone. H1B, in particular, is pretty much entirely a system of putting immigrants in a bad situation that makes it hard for them to challenge their employers.

So much of the US immigration system is built on undercutting wages for native workers.

IMO, more than anything immigrants need a lot more protections particularly from deportation. If we want to punish someone for using undocumented immigrants it shouldn't be the immigrant, it should be the business owner that employed them. But also, if someone has been here for 10 years without causing problems there should be a fast path to citizenship.

I've know a family of undocumented workers that have been in the US for the last 30+ years. They don't have citizenship because it's too expensive and to complex for them to get through. Yet there they've been working on cattle farms, babysitting, paying taxes, and teaching me a bit of Spanish.

I think it’s a little more nuanced than that. They are against things that would lessen the collective bargaining power of those in their union. This is the whole point of unions, to collectively bargain.

If those immigrants were forced to join the union upon entering the U.S. and entering that sector of work, I don’t see the union having a problem with that. The issue is that would lead to those immigrants and all other members of the union being paid more, which is a no-no for the billionaire class.

So they’re not anti-immigrant. They’re against billionaires abusing immigration to pay people less.

That's not true. The MLBPA (baseball players) is definitely not anti-immigrant.

The an_cap position on immigration is open borders which is the opposite of "people who can be deported if they complain about their working conditions". Feel free to check the comment history.

The econ 101 observation feels like it falls apart under light scrutiny. The market sets a rate, but which rate is more "natural?" When individuals negotiate directly with employers, they tend to be at a disadvantage. An individual has less knowledge and bargaining power than an employer in almost all cases; so can we call the rate set by these negotiations to be the "natural" rate? Conversely, when bargaining collectively, employees are able to pool knowledge and resources to bargain more effectively, and they have more leverage as a group which allows them to negotiate on a more even field to the employer. I would consider this outcome to be more "natural," and would argue that it is not that collective bargaining results in higher wages than the market would set but that individual bargaining results in wages that are artificially lower than those of the market clearing rate.

Unions are part of the market like anything else. If wages are higher, they aren't above market-clearing levels, those are the new market-clearing levels. If workers form a union and bargain collectively, that is what the market naturally set.

Do you apply the same argument for employers? Companies contribute to low wages. By collectively bargaining with employees (e.g. hiring at the local grocery store is centralized, you can't go around to all the individual managers and start a bidding war) they can negotiate wages that are lower than what the market would naturally set.

For markets to operate well, prices must be easily accessible by both buyers and sellers. Since corporations do their utmost to ensure that workers don't discover wages and salaries of their peers, corporations suppress wages. So, corporations are bad for the common good.

And I bet COSTCO membership-based, warehouse-club model is a bad thing too, since they are able to negotiate prices lower that what the market would naturally set?

> An econ 101 observation

Econ 101 observations are utterly useless without the specific context in which they're made. This is like talking about spherical cows in a vacuum in the context of aerodynamics.

In the specific case of unions, they always forget to mention that a higher proportion of a company's income going to salaries generally means increased consumer spending for workers, which spurs other kinds of industry and services that may mean a net benefit for the global economy.

Of course second and third-order effects are not really talked about in Econ 101.

> Everyone is exempt,

This comes with a catch in California. In order to make software developers exempt there is a minimum salary you must pay otherwise you are required to keep them hourly and pay overtime where appropriate.

https://www.dir.ca.gov/oprl/ComputerSoftware.htm

> It's a shame that so many are drawn to this just because of a passion for gaming.

"Just"?? It sounds like you've greatly underrated the value of indulging a passion.

If you enjoy your job your employer is able to exploit you more?

i have a passion for eating, i dont have a passion for dentistry

> If you want that, you’d have to negotiate for it, and now doesn’t seem like a great time.

Software engineers can be pretty foolish. When we had more power, unions were unpopular because too many imbibed some libertarian propaganda, looked at their high salaries, and decided to cosplay as bosses. Now that power is slipping away, and will slip away faster because we did little to preserve it to our determent.

Also the technology union people were dumb, seemed to focus more on hot-button political activism than worker power, and thus undermined their own project. IMHO, a union should be monomanically about representing worker interests and stay far away from any other kind of issue, because controversy around those issues allows the bosses to divide-and-conquer the union.

And CWA is part of AFL-CIO, which is the largest federation of unions in the country, representing ~15 million workers.

That's how it works in other countries. Unions are per industry, not per business, because per business is... weird and not really helpful.

The union negotiates salary ranges for the entire industry, so it doesn't matter if one company is being difficult, their organisation (the one that organises the employers of that industry) have agreed to the ranges on their behalf.

If you need to go on strike, the union members employed at other businesses can help cover wages. Your union can also call for sympathy strikes at other businesses, putting additional pressure on the misbehaving company.

Is there an alternative union that you think Id employees should have joined?

"Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running."

Can you tell me where you work, and are you hiring???

Losing devs that built a service, its infrastructure, build pipelines, tests, etc. Can sometimes mean losing deep knowledge.

Sometimes an issue arises and without that deep knowledge you'll be waiting weeks for a fix. Better hope it isnt a critical issue like a serious vulnerability or that you can hire the deep knowledge on a temporary consultancy contract.

Sometimes services are fully rewritten from scratch because the new devs cant get a build of the old service to compile/run/do the thing™.

Staring down the barrel of being primary on-call over Christmas for a dozen k8s clusters running thousands of nodes. How I wish it were true that we could trust computer programs to just keep running.

PagerDuty wouldn't exist if this were true.

Every on-call rotation I've ever been on would like a word.

You do realize that, um, software need hardware. And also security upgrades often require software engineers. And uh, software maintenance is what engineers actually do most of the time.

It only takes one bad deployment to bring huge swaths of the internet down nowadays, just look at Cloudflare, AWS, etc. costing millions of dollars in downstream economic impact.

Sure, a platform will continue to run on a given day without intervention, but that’s like playing Russian roulette: at some point you’ll need intervention and you’ll likely need it fast.

You know, 1.5x for overtime seems great until it is enforced for everybody (like it's done in Quebec) and so it is forbidden by company leadership unless it is deemed a necessity. So for people with more time on their hands than responsabilities, they usually can't (voluntarily) work more in their main job to boost their pay, and so they get side jobs, which are usually not declared.

Mandated 1.5x overtime has consequences.

Another side effect (that I know happens in manufacturing jobs) is that people will deliberately slow their work during the week to work overtime on the weekend. I'd wager this is very common in jobs with frequent overtime opportunities.

Ask Google about "difference between industrial and craft union".

There's US labor history involved. The AFL-CIO was formed by a 1955 merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The AFL was the umbrella organization for the craft unions - electricians, plumbers, etc. The CIO was the umbrella organization for the industrial unions - everybody non-management in an auto plant, everybody non-management in a steel mill, etc. That's what "wall to wall" means.

Agreeing on the bargaining unit is a major issue in employer-union relations. A "wall to wall" agreement avoids internal issues over who can do what job. (Is plumbing for compressed air a plumber or a steamfitter job?) That helps the employer. But it gives the union more leverage over the employer because the union has all the employees.

Industrial unions organize by shop; craft unions organize by trade. Industrial unions have much greater leverage because they can (theoretically) change conditions for the entire workplace, not just for one group of workers in the workplace. Historically, this meant, for example, organizing everyone in the auto factory in one union as “auto workers” instead of having machinists in one union, engravers in another union, mechanics in another, etc.

In my experience, getting management recognition for overtime is an uphill battle.

Even when I did get paid at some elevated rate, if we divided actual hours worked with the money I got, I still made way less than my hourly rate.

Electrical work is physical work, to point out just one obvious difference.

Being interchangeable is literally why unions are formed. If you have some unique skill set that is valued, a union is unnecessary and would hold you back. If you’re happy being slotted in to whatever the next available position is based on your seniority with no regard to you as an individual, unions are great.

That’s why they’re mostly autoworkers or longshoremen and whatnot an not professionals, outside a few niches motivated by ideology.

Did you miss the last sentence or had your mind made up already by then?

the reason I don't want a typical union is because they work out well where there is a clear separation of labor & capital. labor get paid wages & capital makes money off the invested assets. problem with tech is that in a tech ventures labor is a part owner and capital too (engineer equity). introducing a 3rd party (unions & union leadership) in these situations will likely have the worst effect on the capital portion of labor & possibly eroding the incentives altogether. Imagine having a set of union rules to follow when distributing equity to early stage engineers? how do you decide equitable when by definition you are on cutting edge of tech & innovation. & if you think that wont happen you are mistaken, that is where the biggest pie is and unions arent exactly 'shining beacon of honesty and integrity' either. Look all I want is just some basic labor laws are followed and tech employees dont feel the panic when they hear slack-chime on a weekend night.

there are other mechanisms like state level enforcement of labor laws and punitive fines. you know the good old law enforcement. its really not so hard if you actually want to do it.

Those things can also be part of law, see Europe.

The challenge with having good worker protection laws and high minimum wage is that at some point local labour becomes less competitive with foreign low cost options. Then you'll need tariffs or other import rules to keep your local industries alive.

Why wouldn't you defend the executives. They lead the company, so they have the power to make decisions on how it should operate. They will always have the power to choose how it operates union or not. Forming a union is just a power grab for the union.

You are imputing motives that are not in evidence.

And vacations.

Yeah the distributed nature of tech makes unionizing naturally difficult - multiple offices with different reporting chains, remote teams, etc. The way CWA handled this for Alphabet is a sort of fake "PR" union where the company is under no obligation to bargain with you and you don't really any of the protections.

An app could maybe help here as well to define more viable bargaining units - like "the QA team" rather than the "NYC Office" which may have thousands of employees with different eligibility and reporting chains.

Would you be opposed to a tech bro making a startup out of this? :)