Comment by ajkjk
3 days ago
Of course the reason it works this way is that it works. As much as we'd like accountability to happen on the basis of principle, it actually happens on the basis of practicality. Either the engineers organize their power and demand a new relationship with management, or projects start going so poorly that necessity demands a better working relationship, or nothing changes. There is no 'things get better out from wisdom alone' option; the people who benefit from improvements have to force the hand of the people who can implement them. I don't know if this looks like a union or something else but my guess is that in large part it's something else, for instance a sophisticated attempt at building a professional organization that can spread simple standards which organizations can clearly measure themselves against.
I think the reasons this hasn't happened is (a) tech has moved too fast for anyone to actually be able to credibly say how things should be done for longer than a year or two, and (b) attempts at professional organizations borrowed too much from slower-moving physical engineering and so didn't adapt to (a). But I do think it can be done and would benefit the industry greatly (at the cost of slowing things down in the short term). It requires a very 'agile' sense of standards, though.. If standards mean imposing big constraints on development, nobody will pay attention to them.
You forgot c) we're in a culture where people jump ship every 3-5 years. There's no incentive to learn from mistakes that you don't talk about at the next company, nor any care for the long term health of the current company.
>a sophisticated attempt at building a professional organization that can spread simple standards which organizations can clearly measure themselves against.
We have that as a form of IEEE, but it really doesn't come up much if you're not already neck deep in the organization.
> 3-5 years
That's maybe in Europe. Plenty of US developers those days have a litany of ~1-2 year stints at FAANGs and startups du jour in their CV.
Speaking as someone in the US, I've worked at multiple companies (some startups, some small businesses, some larger) that have either outright imploded or had mass department-level layoffs inside that 1-2 year timeframe. Some of them I would have stayed at longer than 1-2 years if I had the choice. I'm not claiming it's universal by any means, but there is a lot of volatility at US businesses in my personal experience.
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Jump ship every 3-5 years because if you don’t, your wages will stagnate. A prophet has honor except in his own home as it were.
True although perhaps that is part of (a), things move too fast.
It "works" only on a certain timescale. We don't have sufficient incentives and penalties to make things fail quickly. A relevant example in the tech world is data breaches. If data breaches resulted in a thorough public audit and financial/criminal penalties for the managers who pushed for speed over safety, they would no longer "work".
> If standards mean imposing big constraints on development, nobody will pay attention to them.
Unless there are penalties for not doing so.
> tech has moved too fast for anyone to actually be able to credibly say how things should be done for longer than a year or two
But that's just it. If things are moving so fast that you can't say how things should be done, then that tells you that the first thing that should be done is to slow everything way down.
I agree wholeheartedly that collective action is how we stop balancing poor management on the backs of engineers, but good luck getting other engineers to see it that way. There's heaps of propaganda out there telling engineers that if they join a union their high salary will go away, even though unions have never been shown to reduce wages.
I don't like unions because one bad hire can destroy a whole team, and the option to remove that hire is worth more than any benefit a union can give me.
I also think people here misunderstand what unions do. Unions are inherently conservative (small c) institutions that aim to protect the status quo. Improving processes is not a fundamental goal to unions. We saw this with the ILA that fought to essentially ban automation in the ports that would drastically increase efficiency because of the belief that this would reduce union jobs. It's foolish to think software unions wouldn't end up becoming like this.
> I don't like unions because one bad hire can destroy a whole team, and the option to remove that hire is worth more than any benefit a union can give me.
In MANY other countries there is already WAY more regulations regarding layoffs and firing employees that has nothing to do with unions.
In Germany there is a probationary period in which you can just fire somebody for no reason basically. That time can be like half a year (in my case) and in most cases it becomes clear if the new hire fits your team or doesn't.
All unrelated to unions though. The big unions in Germany for example have a lot of power and if you are just a simple welder for example you'd have no chance getting anything done without a union.
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I'd rather have the protections for my working conditions than worrying about whether my co-workers are contributing enough to the company's bottom line but maybe that makes me an outlier here.
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"thanks for preserving status quo" - your boss
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There's trial periods… why do you notice a bad hire after 5 years?
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I've worked places that refuse to fire low performers and its hard for it to not be toxic. I'm not saying this outcome is a forgone conclusion of unions, but my union experience is that poor performers take even longer to get rid of and I'm not sure I would be interested in that sort of environment again. This is more of an implementation problem than philosophical, but theoretically good and practically bad is still just bad.
Until healthcare and housing aren't tied to employment, making it easier to fire people will always be the monstrous position. If you want firing people with abandon to be socially acceptable then you need a public safety net. Until that's in place, I'm always going to be on the side of labor organizations demanding dignity than the people destroying lives.
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You don't have to fire "low performers" you just have to be realistic about their skillsets and use them that way.
If you see an engineer is out of his depth then change his position, no need to fire them since like others have pointed out, that can have severe consequences in their personal lives and most of the time they can still be useful if they get more adequate work.
My hunch is that software engineers are averse to unions because they correctly perceive that unions are a wide angle away from the type of professional organization that would be most beneficial to them. The industry is sufficiently different that the normal union model is just not very good and has a 'square leg round hole' feeling.
For instance by and large the role of organizing to not to get more money but rather to reduce indignities... Wasted work, lack of forethought, bad management, arbitrary layoffs, etc. So it is much more about governing management with good practices than about keeping wages up; at least for now wages are generally high anyway.
there are also reasons to dedend jobs/wages in the face of e.g. outsourcing... But it's almost like a separate problem. Maybe there needs to be both a union and a uncoupled professional standard or something?
what type of professional organization is most beneficial? Standards are already out there, but they need a union or government regulation to be enforced. Devs who want real change need to pick their medicine, or continue to let the industry stagnate.
>the role of organizing to not to get more money but rather to reduce indignities
agreed. And I think that's why it's going to really start taking hold as we enter year 4 of mass layoffs in the US (because outsourcing). Alongside overwork from the "survivors" and abusive PIPs to keep people on edge.
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Guess that's why gamedev is the one region where this is really starting to gain momentum. High salaries were already not a thing, and tend to mean nothing if you're laid off after 3 years of development for the release of a new game.
Though I think Gen Z in general will be making waves in the coming years. They can't even get a foot in the door, so why should they care about "high salaries"?
People aren't going to try to wrest control from management because some project is going off the rails. No one has any particular faith their coworkers will run anything better, and the pay checks show up regardless.
A union might help improve wages and working conditions in some organizations (although I personally wouldn't want one). But there is zero chance that a union could ever achieve widespread improvement in software architecture, methodologies, or project management. We don't have much consensus on the right way to do things, and what worked well in one circumstance often causes disaster in another.
I don't think unions are the right thing here, you just need to get together as a team and talk with your higher ups, that's a far smaller scope than where unions normally come in.
But I totally agree, I think people are too compliant and fear banding together to have influence on higher ups. I'd argue in most places the engineers have far more power than they realize since they are in high demand due to shortages of qualified personnel. (at least in many countries in Europe)
There are tons of factors in play though that I believe contribute to this like some employees being friends with their higher ups not wanting to hurt their careers, not wanting the tough discussions, the repercussions if management says "no" etc..
> you just need to get together as a team
"Just". Come on, man, you know better than that. I too like my sci-fi to be over the top unrealistic.
Truth is, nobody ever thinks about their rights before it's too late. The paycheck shows up on time every month and people just don't want to rock the boat. Not to mention all the opportunists that will tell on you immediately to gain the favor of the upper class.
These things are well-known and apparently nothing ever changes before the guillotines start working. I don't think anything will ever improve in our area. Nobody is bothered. The people who are have zero power. And so it goes.
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How about licensure and liability instead? That’s the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of the rest of the engineering world. Sure it’s a guild system with a new name, but if the bridge collapses, somebody is going to be in a courtroom.
Customers are free to demand that software vendors take liability for certain defects or failures as part of contract negotiation. There's no need for governments to get involved.
For software that's actually safety critical, like avionics, there are already sufficient regulatory controls.
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And the one in the courtoom is the head of the engineering firm, not the low level guy :)
Has union labor resulted in measurable improvement in production outcomes in any industry they’re found in? I don’t think going from “managers are unaccountable for failure” to “nobody is accountable for failure” is a good thing.
I think introducing more competition at higher levels may be better than eliminating it below. This should be happening because I’m pretty sure most PMs could be replaced by an LLM.
How about we transition from “managers are unaccountable for failure” to “managers are accountable for every failure by default and are sued and have houses confiscated within two months of a case being open”? That must include CEOs as well though, not just some bootlicker PMs.
Executives are generally incompetent everywhere and of course they'll introduce a reality distortion field where none of them are ever accountable. That should be obvious to anyone. Question is why do all working people keep allowing it to happen. But the answer to that is also known and quite depressing, too.
In a world like that, I hope it becomes standard practice to shoot at and bomb the repo men.
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Have you done any research into this or are you just assuming unions lead to bad outcomes because you've been propagandized for decades about it?
> This should be happening because I’m pretty sure most PMs could be replaced by an LLM
Says a lot about your understanding of these things.
While I too doubt that unions would be a net negative and I might even suspect interference by paid malicious actors to discourage people to unionize and thus never have power, I can't agree with your skepticism that PMs cannot be replaced by LLMs.
Most PMs I've ever met had zero clue what they are doing. And no it's not only N=1 sample, same anecdote is heard from many, many other people.
But sadly enough, undeniable human incompetence there is not even the biggest problem. The "we will never make more reasonable deadline" is.
Most managers, not just PMs, are an objective net negative. As any ruling class always does, they get complacent and think that just putting their foot down is going to magically change reality.
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