I'm an engineer at Google. This article's description of stack ranking and perf is fundamentally and completely wrong. There is no stack ranking for perf ratings, there is no percentage of people that have to fail, and managers are not allowed or empowered to give people poor perf ratings in the way described here.
This is correct. There is no formalized stack ranking (at least for eng positions) at Google. There's always informal stacking: "does it make sense this person is rated above this other one?" "If we line up all the promotes and don't promotes, does this cut off point make sense)." However, I've seen cases where 75% of the promos made it and cases where it was closer to 30%. It just depends on the group at the time.
I was at Google in 2011 and I remember the internal flame wars you triggered about performance reviews. You mis-characterized the process internally then, and you mischaracterize it now.
Perhaps you were on a dysfunctional team, or had a particularly bad manager, but this is most certainly not the general case.
Stack ranking was not mandatory, but the perf UI certainly let you stack rank your peers if you wanted. I never did and management never cared. There was certainly no curve, and managers did not have to create low performers by quota.
If there's one complaint I had about the Google perf system was that it rewarded popularity and networking perhaps more than competence and effectiveness.
But how could a company that fired the great Michael O. Church possibly be anything other than pure evil?
More seriously, I would never want to work at a place that is structurally unable to fire toxic people, which is one of the big downsides of unionization from the "worker" perspective.
In my experience, Google didn't have a forced curve ranking then, either. I've been a manager at Google since 2007 or so (with a 3-year gap when I went walkabout 2011-2014), I've probably participated in calibration of many thousands of engineers (and other ladders), and I've never once heard of a calibration score being adjusted to fit some expectation that a certain number of employees needed to be ranked as underperformers.
While scores are almost never directly manipulated "as we are not hitting the curve" my experience is that you know what the curve is supposed to look like and people on the bubble one way or another are pushed in a particular direction during calibration to make the curve line up. Then at the end you all look at the curve and pat yourselves on the back for another round of matching what you expected to see rather than asking if expecting to see a particular curve influenced the results.
I've never seen people pushed like that to make the curve line up, that I can recall. There's a belief that if you have a large enough sample, that the distribution will have a certain shape (that is, it's unlikely that if you have 500 people in a calibration that there won't be a few underperformers). I've never seen that used to change a score, either in an retrospective or anticipatory fashion, but only to assess whether the process is being internally honest, and only at scales that are large enough that the concern isn't particularly affected by sampling error. (That is, if past experience is that a certain outlying part of the curve has roughly 2% of employees in it, I've never seen anyone object because that bucket is empty with a N of 150 or less.)
What I am saying is that you probably do not realize you are doing it, but if you have an expectation of hitting a particular curve (and please don't try to tell me that there is no page somewhere outlining what are the expected percentages at various performance levels...) then you will bias yourself towards hitting that curve. You will not realize it, but you will do it anyway.
This usually happens at calibration and not initial assessment, but I am quite certain that it _does_ happen because the numbers do not lie.
I guess at some point, I agree, but this is so far from the problems of forced ranking and application of curves to small numbers of staff that I think it's incommensurate.
I've been a manager at Google for nearly 10 years. The only time these types of analysis were done that I'm aware of, was at the VP level. They were used as statistical measure to see if the performance review system data fit probabilistic expectations. In other words, it was a measure of quality.
I've never seen this sort of thing done to affect individual or even small team scores and/or distributions.
We do not even use numeric scores any more. I wasn't at the company in 2011 so I can't comment on possible historical accuracy, but it's nothing like this today.
At this point I feel it'd be fair to make heavy revisions to the blog post.
One must think, if you really were the expert you position yourself to be, you should've been able to talk to at least ONE person working in a BIG4 before putting your name underneath it all?
Come on. Google doesn't need to unionize cause they are the chosen ones made of special star dust. They believe what IBM employees at their hey day believed - in rainbows and ponies. And then what happened?
We have a union for IT workers (including developers) at my workplace. I was only recently allowed to leave it as a result of becoming a supervisor.
In my opinion, the union was manipulative and not beneficial to employee outcomes. They were first and foremost politicians who used union funds to support various unrelated political objectives and didn't really offer any substantive help or improvement with salary/benefits.
After I left (completely in accordance with procedure and my position), the union sent me a threatening letter demanding that I continue sending them dues.
As a very "left leaning" person politically, I'm totally pro-labor, but unions often only pay lip service to the employees they are supposed to benefit.
>We have a union for IT workers (including developers) at my workplace. I was only recently allowed to leave it as a result of becoming a supervisor.
If you exit the union but still work at the company you're free riding on the higher benefits and wages negotiated by the union your coworkers paid for.
If you really don't like unions that much you can leave and go work for a company that isn't unionized. It isn't like there's a shortage of them.
This is an incredibly arrogant argument for a union to be making. If a union gains membership by forcing employees to be union members, its claim to be legitimately representing employees becomes very weak, IMO.
Closed shop tactics are ways for unions to gain power, often at the expense of labour. Also, once its place a union doesn't need to do much to win members. The incentives are all wrong. These things collapsed all over the world for a reason.
The cheek of believing they "own" these benefits and should be payed by anyone who wants this job.
I don't think there's any question that a union that lives up to the ideals of the labor movement - solidarity, equality, power for working people over their own lives - has to persuade people that membership is worth it, not coerce them. You're right that there's a connection between the collapse of unions and their bureaucratization and loss of the ability to persuade workers that membership is worth not just paying for, but fighting for.
But free riding is a real problem. If people can gain the benefits of union protection while avoiding the costs and risks of union membership, that temptation will be enormous. And if you believe workers deserve control over their own lives, including their workplace lives, some of that control has to be collective and democratic, not just individual. In a workplace and a society, decisions that affect everybody collectively and override individuals will get made. The alternative to democracy making those decisions isn't that everybody has infinite liberty, it's that the boss makes those decisions.
I agree to an extent, however this is where is comes back to arrogance vs humility. A union believing itself to be the only indispensable guardian of worker from abuse to the extent that they feel comfortable running a closed shop (these things are not historically rare) means you end up with two bosses. You're no less a slave to a system.
In any case, the democracy argument is tricky. Democracy might have voting, but it is not voting.
Even calling this free riding rubs me the wrong way. It implies they are claiming ownership over something that I don't think they own.
Planting you flag, demanding compliance, excluding... Whether or not you vote I don't like it, I don't think it's power to the working person. I might hold my nose and pay the fees, I might also laugh at my boss's jokes or agree that unpaid overtime. None of those things are empowering though.
>This is an incredibly arrogant argument for a union to be making. If a union gains membership by forcing employees to be union members
Workers vote to decide on whether to unionize. If you don't like the outcome of the vote, you can quit and go work for a non-union company.
>its claim to be legitimately representing employees becomes very weak, IMO.
You must hate democracy.
>Closed shop tactics are ways for unions to gain power, often at the expense of labour
No, closed shop tactics are a way for unions to gain power so that they can better represent labor. It prevents management from using divide and conquer against the workforce (their primary strategy).
>These things collapsed all over the world for a reason.
Because there has been a vicious campaign against them for decades. This is why wages are stagnant and profits are skyrocketing and the 0.01% own all the wealth.
Arrogance, again. Lack of unions is NOT the reason for the 1% - its banking/investment regulation. What we do at the grass-roots level has become profoundly irrelevant to those in positions of power.
And there's a word for that union 'democracy' you are so proud of - its called tyranny of the majority. Its using the trappings of democracy to hijack everybody's decisions about work.
Do you think there is no relationship between the state of regulation of banking (which I'd argue is less central to the policy story than tax rates but that's a side note) and the state of organized working-class power? How do you think those regulations get made?
The only thing I dislike is protecting the bad apples such as police union or teacher union style tenured.
I feel like company HR aren't there for you but for the company and unions are there for you.
I was in a situation were I was harass by my boss and HR was never there for me. After twice reporting, there was an incident where I decided I'm going to quit because I couldn't handle the harassment. This was in a gov agency mind you and I regret not joining a union.
We also had an option to take out of our paycheck a monthly fee for legal advice and retainers. I got that option just cause I thought it was a nice security I really don't know why I would need it. It turns out these retainers cannot help you legally against your boss or company btw.
> I feel like company HR aren't there for you but for the company and unions are there for you.
HR is paid by management to manage -- that is, assure that the company can get the most out of for the least cost -- the "human resources" of the company.
Unions are paid by their members to assure that those members can get the most out of their employers for the least cost.
From the employees point of view, it is quite literally true that HR is not there for you whereas unions are (or, more accurately, the union you are a member of, if any, is) there for you.
> We also had an option to take out of our paycheck a monthly fee for legal advice and retainers. I got that option just cause I thought it was a nice security I really don't know why I would need it. It turns out these retainers cannot help you legally against your boss or company btw.
Yeah, employer-arranged group legal services plans never cover any scenario where you are against your employer; they are something the company arranges so that employers can be less distracted from serving the company's interest by outside legal matters.
I think if we could externalize the benefits of unions such that they don't protect the willfully lazy and don't hinder the brilliant, that might be the best of both worlds.
Good luck with that unless California AB 465 passes and is signed by governor Brown and upheld in federal court. (Note: There is some concern AB 465 might not survive a federal court challenge as it might conflict with the Federal Arbitration Act).
Most employers make binding arbitration a necessary condition of employment. Binding arbitration makes it almost impossible to win a case against an employer.
Binding arbitration is not so binding especially in cases that violate federal law related to the EEOC or NLRB. I am in the middle of writing a post about this. Will share when done.
I actually think the worst bad habit of unions is taking over managerial functions -- eg scheduling, vacations. It effectively turns the union into a subcontractor, and employees start needing a union to protect them from the union.
This actually happened to us. We were unionized by the government, and they've taken over our vacation, fitness, and various other gift benefits, which they are slowly taking away from us (vacation just got nipped). Otherwise, they just take money from our paycheck and do nothing useful. I personally think something dodgy is going on, but you don't argue with the government.
Well, the Chinese communist party, which is basically the government. All of us are supposed to be a part of a union; they let foreign tech companies slide for awhile but closed that loophole a couple of years ago.
It is a trade union, but will "work closely with management to resolve any problems in a harmonious way." So not really what you would expect from a union in the west.
> So not really what you would expect from a union in the west
Oh, you know, these days in the West, the big unions are more partners with the governments/employers than they are on the side of the workers.
Many unions have become tools that exists only to perpetuate their own existence, instead of being tools for workers to organize and collectively defend their interests against those of their employers and governments.
That's the biggest problem; when your union caves into the government/corps demands then you get screwed and yet you're still forced to pay union dues and be a member of that union. All the major unions in Ontario (Canada) actually maintained a wage freeze and gave up some benefits and vacation because of financial issues in the government; the only unions that had wage increases were the police unions.
On the other hand, my buddy who's a construction worker gets a decent wage and great benefits because of his union. The last time their union leaders tried to screw things up for them, the union workers went on strike against that leader.
>Otherwise, they just take money from our paycheck and do nothing useful
Yep, that's par for the course for most governments whether they're liberal or conservative :)
Unions historically were organized by people that were individually very replaceable, could not find easily another job if fired, had limited education and means to fight for their rights and improve their condition.
For this reasons ther employers could force upon them punishing work conditions and contracts, and unions allowed workers to leverage their number electing representatives that could organize them and would be better suited to negotiate with the employers.
I fail to see any connection with engineers which can easily move between jobs, command decent salaries and benefits and are more than able to negotiate better conditons individually with their employers.
Maybe a more suitable organization would resemble the medieval artisan and merchant guilds...
> Unions historically were organized by people that were individually very replaceable, could not find easily another job if fired, had limited education and means to fight for their rights and improve their condition.
Not really. It's not just writers and actors, examples mentioned in the post. Baseball players (stars made middle-class salaries before the union). Engineers at Boeing and other aerospace companies.
Machinists, who were the software developers of the early 20th century (high-skill workers who spent their time automating things away), were not just unionized but often union pioneers and at the leading edge of militancy. Radical machinists were at the forefront of some of the most dramatic moments in labor history, like the strikes that knocked Russia and Germany out of the First World War.
This idea that unions are for peons is a mythology that software engineers tell each other in order to separate themselves conceptually from other workers. I think in part it's motivated by a sincere recognition of relative privilege, but sometimes I'm afraid it may also be motivated by a certain concealed snobbery.
Worth mentioning, but this isn't exactly true for baseball players: "Baseball players (stars made middle-class salaries before the union)."
They got nothing like the millions in the game today, and ownership was taking 75% of the revenue (today it's closer to 55%).
Babe Ruth famously signed a contract that paid him more than the president ($80k in the early 1930s was a LOT of money). When asked about it, he said "Well, I had a better year than he did."
Not intended to diminish your point, I just wanted to share a funny store about one of the more interesting characters from the game's history.
I'm sorry if I came across as a snob, I honestly value highly the unions contributions to workers' rights (all workers), historically.
I just do not see any factual reason for a "SW developer union", since it is a very modern role, and as a group never experienced any need that could be solved by unionizing.
As you mention for the case of baseball players (or the actors, in another post), the union was made during a period in which the current work conditions were not seen by the category as fair.
Didn't mean to accuse you yourself of being a snob. A lot of people take the same line as you.
I think the linked post describes some issues that could be addressed by unionizing - arbitrary management and degrading ranking systems. You could add secret non-compete agreements to cap salaries (which are not too far from that pre-free agency baseball case) and gender and race-based discrimination in hiring, pay, promotions etc.
> I fail to see any connection with engineers which can easily move between jobs, command decent salaries and benefits and are more than able to negotiate better conditons individually with their employers.
Easily move between jobs:
Only true currently, and only if you're in certain metro areas. Are we forgetting 2007-2010? or 2001-2004? There are likely more down years than up, but I've only been in the workplace since the mid nineties.
Command decent salaries and benefits:
Decent compared to the median nationwide salary, sure, but decent compared the value brought to the companies? Hypothetical example: Who's more "decently" paid? The $15/hr fast food employee who delivers $30/hr in value to their company, or the $150K software engineer who delivers $2MM in value to their company?
More able to negotiate better conditions individually with their employers:
On what planet? Go ask your employer for time-and-a-half overtime pay and let me know if they only laugh for a few seconds or a whole minute. See if Legal is willing to make an exception to their mandatory IP assignment or binding arbitration clauses just for you.
"The $15/hr fast food employee who delivers $30/hr in value to their company, or the $150K software engineer who delivers $2MM in value to their company?"
As a consultant I can actually measure the direct amount of money I bring in. I often wonder if I'm only worth the 10% I get of that money or I can do better elsewhere?
The product I work with is making significant gains in the market now. The demand seems to be growing, judging by the new clients I see at work and recruiters that contact me after hours. I know the supply/demand is in favor of the applicants because it's a highly customized software and we were a tiny startup before being acquired by a tech giant. Not very many people have actual real world experience. I know a handful of ex-employees that want to start a consulting group but we are all really technical. We have people skills from being customer facing consultants but I really need a project manager / business person that can cut the deals.
I think their is a premium associated with the company's brand that allows them to charge more but I could probably charge 2/3 of their hourly rate. That would probably give me about 3x-4x my yearly salary now based on an estimate of not actually averaging 30 hours per week for 40 weeks out the year. I have no idea if those numbers make sense though.
Now that also means I take on the risk of finding and keeping clients, no paid healthcare or other benefits. I understand those things come out of my hourly rate at a company but it still doesn't to be a "fair" split to me. Especially when sites like glassdoor report much much higher salaries for people in my company, in my city, with my job title.
I'm already working with some 3rd party recruiters on contract gigs with government and quasi-government companies. The offers I have seen so far are 3x my current pay with a full benefits package. I'm trying to weigh the need for stability though as I have a significant debt to pay off and a child on the way. These offers also have paid overtime. I am figuring unpaid overtime and travel into my hourly rate because it's important to me. I used to include commute time but I work from home now.
Although I asked for a raise and got nothing. Either my skills aren't as valuable as I think or I suck at negotiating. I turned in my resignation once and was offered a much better salary. Leading me to believe I am valuable in someway to this company. I'm pretty confident they would offer a match again (or at least a decent increase) if I were to leave again but I don't know if I want to keep playing that game. I've been in the industry for 10 years. I'm pretty sure I'm underpaid. In the industry for 10 years. Revenue numbers to prove my worth company. I would think that I could cross into the 6 digit range soon but maybe I'm crazy. I'm not even close to the 150k number thrown out by the comment I quoted.
"I fail to see any connection with engineers which can easily move between jobs, command decent salaries and benefits and are more than able to negotiate better conditons individually with their employers."
What about the illegally low wages (although still very livable) that were created by these companies colluding. That's one way for employees to fight back.
"In 1925, the Masquers Club was formed by actors discontent with the grueling work hours at the Hollywood studios.[6] This was one of the major concerns which led to the creation of the Screen Actors Guild in 1933."
I mean, I guess, if you think you'll always be able to get lawyers to take cases like this on spec you have a point. I don't really think that is the case. We need a legal defense to deal with bullshit like this and a union is an effective way to get it.
That's really not true at all. Traditionally, the centers of gravity for strong unions were around skilled trades.
Engineer mobility is mostly a myth. You have a short shelf life, as generations of engineers can point out. Engineers get laid off en masse when the economy tanks, and as the most cursory google search would tell you, get gamed extensively by the companies they work for. Demand curves are bent by importing labor; salaries are capped by illegal agreements; seniority is avoided by purging.
In Germany they have this alternative structure called the work council. My understanding of it (I had 2-3 workers in Germany 5 years ago) was that it was essentially a union, but only the "good parts". They spoke up around things like stack ranking (and could vote it down) and generally acted as the "employee's HR". Everyone in the council also had to be an employee so you didn't have the overhead (or mob influences) of a traditional "pay in" union scheme.
Anyone here from Germany that can describe it more and talk about what you like / dislike about this system?
Also would like to hear from the Germans how their software billionaires think of unions?
With unions I find it hard to imagine being able to gift 30 billion dollars to future Mark Zuckerbergs or Bill Gates.
When I was in a unionized position, it was frustrating because I couldn't choose to not join (technically I guess I could, but the union and the employer had already agreed that non-union employees still paid 90+% of union dues to the union. why this is legal I have no idea). Anyway, the union (which I became part of because, hey, 10% difference) really didn't help me. They were an entity with lots of institutional power, but they all had their own agenda. It's not like they really had my best interests at heart. It just became one more level of power to answer to. It was really frustrating, and I was happy when I was able to leave.
That is terrible to hear because I am very pro-unions.
I'm not sure I understand everything you said but I assume you're trying to say that employees who are not even members pay dues to the union from their salary. I don't understand this at all and this is not how we operate in sweden.
So that's one major issue with policy in your country.
I don't understand what you mean by 10% difference.
The union does have a lot of power but in my experience most of it is used to negotiate salary raises every year and to advise members who need help with negotiating or general queries.
So I've never felt that the union is another power I have to answer to in any way. The only way I can imagine them giving the impression of being "in the way" would be that the reason salary raises are delayed most years are due to the union negotiations. That hardly matters though as everyone still gets their salary raise retroactively, regardless of when the negotiations end.
With most companies being connected to some sort of collective bargaining deal here, there's really not much reason to join a union. I am a member partly due to ideological reasons and partly due to the fact that managers still fear the unions here and I think that's how it should be.
Without tuting my own horn, I've been a model employee for my It-career so far so I haven't had any need for the union. But should I ever lose my job, or need to enter into any difficult negotiating with my manager, I know they will help me. Because they've helped co-workers and other people around the country in good ways before.
This is more common than you to think. Making everyone pay union dues is intended to avoid free rider problems. When things work like they're supposed to all employees in unionized positions benefit from the union so it makes sense for all of them to pay dues. There may be plenty of reasons for this to not work in practice but that's the logic behind it.
Could you link me to studies that show this effect? What economic reason would there be for this? It makes no sense to me that union creating more expensive labor would increase the costs of non-union labor, except insofar as they reduce the size of the non-union labor pool.
I found a few studies but to be honest I don't have time to read them. Here is an interesting snippet from one report (which I believe is disputing the other studies that say wages increase in proportion to union wages):
The effect of labor unions on wages is one of the more heavily studied topics in empirical
labor economics. There exists a reasonably strong consensus among economists
that the average union-nonunion wage gap is about 15 percent, a consensus based in
no small part on the influence of work by H. Gregg Lewis (1963, 1986). A survey of
labor economists at leading universities by Fuchs, Krueger, and Poterba (1998) asked
the question: "What is your best estimate of the percentage impact of unions on the earnings
of their average member'?" The median response was 15 percent and mean response
13.1 percent; dispersion was low. "
The conclusion of this paper is that the 15% gap estimate is likely far too low (he estimates its actually 21-28%). It also states that when gaps outpage gains, downward wage pressure on nonunion wages due to the "spillover effect" can be understood to be outpacing the upward pressure of "threat effects" (page 4, labeled 236, p.3), which pretty strongly suggests that if his conclusions are correct, unions may have the effect of reducing nonunion wages.
"It makes no sense to me that union creating more expensive labor would increase the costs of non-union labor, except insofar as they reduce the size of the non-union labor pool."
I don't have a link. This is all anecdotal. I could be completely wrong but I don't think I'm far off.
Lowering the pool of non-union workers is one thing, but also competing to keep those workers from joining a union. Companies generally don't want to be unionized. Not only do they need to compete to keep the worker from leaving but they also need to pay enough to keep the workers happy enough to not unionize their shop.
I'm from WV which is basically owned by the coal mines. Each time one of those non-union mines go to vote if they will go union the miners I know tell me the company starts giving out bonuses and things like Harleys to sway them to vote non-union.
Even so things that were created or backed by unions have now become laws and directly benefit non-union workers. Like the 40 hour work week. The end of child labor. Employer health benefits. FMLA.
Well, you're talking about the effects of the threat of unionization, which I would agree is pretty clearly effective in driving labor costs up. I'm wondering more about the effect of established unions and companies or industries that employ both union and non-union labor; in the case that the union exists, has negotiated wages, and the company or industry employs both union and non-union labor, it seems unreasonable that non-union labor prices should float relative to union-negotiated prices, assuming that there is a sufficient supply of non-union labor.
>When I was in a unionized position, it was frustrating because I couldn't choose to not join (technically I guess I could, but the union and the employer had already agreed that non-union employees still paid 90+% of union dues to the union. why this is legal I have no idea).
Then that's not a real union. A real union also has competition; if the conditions are great at an employer the union will slowly lose members. If the union acts badly, the employees will just create a new union. But if there's only one union and it's cozy with the employer then you have a "company union" which will not always work on the benefits for the employees. You see this with teachers unions that hardly protect the teachers (salary/wage freezes and shrinking of benefits have been happening for years now).
>They were an entity with lots of institutional power, but they all had their own agenda. It's not like they really had my best interests at heart. It just became one more level of power to answer to. It was really frustrating, and I was happy when I was able to leave.
Yep and that's precisely the goal of a "company union". They want to make it so that the word "union" is a curse word. Even unions need competition.
It's legal, and in fact normal, under the US labor law regime, because because the union is legally obligated to represent all employees equally, members and non-members, in both collective bargaining and individual grievances. Without something like this the temptation to free-ride those benefits would be pretty enormous.
They aren't obligated to represent all employees equally in collective bargaining. It'd be impossible for them to do so, because there are intra-employee conflicts of interest. Rather than being a fiduciary institution, at least when it comes to negotiation, it's a democratic one that only needs to represent the interests of 50% + 1 members of the union. Often this manifests in trading off the interests of newer members in order to secure benefits for senior members -- sometimes even going so far as to bargain on behalf of retirees who aren't even members. But other configurations of favored and non-favored groups exist (another fairly common one is part time or seasonal employees paying dues but not being effectively representated during contract negotiations).
Grievance representation is a different matter, there the union is much closer to the fiduciary ideal.
Sure, it's not equality in all respects, but they aren't allowed to discriminate purely on the basis of union membership. If they negotiate a pay level for a job classification, that's for everyone. You don't join a union workplace and then negotiate your salary separately while everyone else is on a scale.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sympathetic to your frustration. A lot of U.S. unions are pretty undemocratic and mediocre. It's not unrelated to their weakness.
Can someone explain a bit more the actual current problem? I like to think that in our field of work, we prove ourselves by our abilities and nothing else. I feel like unions are first a way for the less competent to kind of hang in there and not have to try harder. I can see how it's a bit cut-throat currently, but if I'm protected then what do I have to gain by improving my skills? When I think of the industries that are heavily unionized, I picture demoralized workers with union leaders replacing their actual bosses and forcing the group to go along with things they would never find reasonable individually.
Personally, not a fan of the article. Also this line: and nothing will be done about it so long as most software engineers remain apolitical cowards who refuse to fight for themselves.. Thanks...?
I used to feel the same as you, but after years of salary negotiations I began to realize how disadvantaged employees are in the negotiations. In part due to information asymmetry, but also negotiation expertise--or lack thereof.
Given the demand for top talent we are largely underpaid, at least look at the multipliers that top engineers can generate.
So, imagine what you could achieve with collective negotiations. You want a death march to achieve a deadline, great then pay in overtime or stock at 1.5x my salary. You've given me new responsibilities, great I love the new challenge but now contractually we are obliged to open salary discussions to bring my salary inline with those new responsibilities (usually this happens 6 months later). Just a few ideas off the top of my head.
Yep, us programmers are usually introverted but more than that we just have never been given lessons on negotiations. Business people have classes on psychology and on how to deal with workers and clients and they have far more social training and skill to use in their negotiations. Us programmers, jesus christ, we can't even negotiate to be able to use a paltry $500 training budget.
Same. It took 2 months to get a Macbook Pro; it took a month to get a monitor (and the CTO himself walked over to buy it); and I ended up bringing my own keyboard and mouse and mouse pad and headphones. I'll end up bringing in my own monitor to dual monitor and buy my own thunderbolt->dvi cable. It's far easier than trying to negotiate expensing and having to justify it.
I just got my 2009 MBP replaced last month. What a struggle. I finally had to find the right person and explain how it was an embarrassment in front of customers to have a laptop that can't handle our software. I buy my own keyboards, mice, dongles, etc but I'm taking those with me if I leave. We have a program that allows you to purchase things. I ordered a mouse one time and was told the order total amount was too little. So I added a few other things I might need and was denied.
There's a lot about this comment that makes me sad. I think it as, at best, naive to think that somehow software engineering is the one true meritocracy where there is no tension between labor and management. Nevermind the death marches so many developers and engineers are put to (e.g., game developers), or the insane hours that many developers and engineers are regularly forced or heavily socially pressured into working, with often clear career repercussions for not playing along.
> I feel like unions are first a way for the less competent to kind of hang in there and not have to try harder.
Perhaps that is true with some of the more entrenched unions. I don't think unions are all perfect by any means. But that is a far cry from many unions, and certainly never (or at least rarely) the reason the unions started. Unions are not about letting you rest on your laurels, though leadership can turn them into that, they are about ensuring fair treatment and due process.
I'm not saying unions are right for West Coast tech sector, but I don't think they should be dismissed out of hand. And while I appreciate where your view of unions comes from, I don't think it appreciates the whole picture.
And finally, it must be noted that some unions are just very small in scope, but still effective. My wife is in a union, and their main sources of negotiation are 1) parking and 2) the incredibly inequitable distribution of work for those not on a particular "pathway" (this is a healthcare field). That's effectively it, and it has made a huge difference. There is no protectionism for bad performance, or tenure, or scheduling preferences, etc.
> I like to think that in our field of work, we prove ourselves by our abilities and nothing else.
How certain are you that the best developer you know is also the best paid? Is "being good at interviews/charming management" an ability that you consider important? How about "being well-connected"?
Unions would not fix this. Badly run, they would swap charm for seniority. Well run, however, they would tackle the objective economic fact that in a negotiation between one human and an institution, there are information and resource asymmetries, which the larger entity will exploit to their advantage, and it would even the playing field a whole lot. Avoid fixating on silver bullets and try to think of the many ways in which the dynamics would change.
I think unions would be a net positive for most developers, including tons of excellent performers without much mind for business who get taken advantage of by both management and slick-talking peers.
>Unions would not fix this. Badly run, they would swap charm for seniority.
The reason why unions often settle on age/experience as a way to measure seniority is because it's objective so it makes a decent compromise.
If you leave it up to management they will usually end up rewarding/promoting those who pledge fealty to them over those who are more skilled, and union sympathizers will be singled out and punished no matter how skilled or productive.
>* I feel like unions are first a way for the less competent to kind of hang in there and not have to try harder*
That's a common misconception; not all unions are like that. Some unions do value seniority such as teachers' unions which seem to think that even the shittiest teacher still deserves to keep their job and lately, at least in Canada, they haven't been fighting properly for benefits.
Valuing seniority despite incompetence is something we typically see in the corporate world. Where do you think the inspiration for the Pointy-Haired Boss in Dilbert comics comes from?
A programmers union would only need to establish a lower limit; if you're a bad programmer you'll eventually be found out and your salary will never go above X but we at least need to establish what X is. I've seen decent junior programmers start at 45k salary or even 40k (gender discrimination was at play there) and no benefits or 401k/group RRSP or anything else. They were basically treated like crap. That's something we can prevent by unionizing. The programmers making 100k can join the union too and won't be capped in their salary or anything else; they'll just get the satisfaction of making sure other programmers aren't exploited.
>and nothing will be done about it so long as most software engineers remain apolitical cowards who refuse to fight for themselves.. Thanks...?
You will have to admit that it is accurate. I've seen lots of programmers who think that keeping their head down and just coding will magically result in promotions and pay raises and a bigger training or conference budget. It won't. It won't and you'll get screwed. There's a coder at work who didn't even take vacation! And the company doesn't pay out vacation so you're forced to take it. He was screwing himself by not asking for $$$ in exchange for not taking vacation time, and every year he never uses the $500 training budget. Working for 3 years that's $1500, enough for a few good conferences, enough for travel expenses and hotel to be paid for a 2 day conference at least. But will he attempt to go for that? No way; Why? Because it requires politics. It requires actually interacting with people.
I've seen other programmers come into the office on weekends and they didn't band together to avoid that unpaid overtime just to avoid politics.
As an aside, you can hardly be blamed for this attitude: It's likely the result of decades of anti-union propaganda. You think most people in your company's salaries are simply proportional to their mad skillz?
The author lists several current problems directly in the article: Stack ranking, binding mandatory arbitration clauses, non-competes, inclusion of performance reviews in a candidate’s transfer packet for internal mobility, mandatory IP assignment, severance, overtime pay.
Basically anything where the information gap and power disparity between the employee and the employer leads to employees having no option besides "accept it or quit".
This kind of hate that Americans have for unions is something I will never understand.
Unions have clear purpose: help the workers negotiate with the company with equal opportunities and prevent abuse from the employer. Companies have power, money and lawyers and, usually, a worker has none of those; so, if one day the worker has a conflict with the company, the Union will be there to assist the worker.
I've been working in a couple of companies that had a Union (in Europe, not USA) and it has been always a good experience. The guys in the Union knew quite well how law works in the country and helped the employer to always keep a relationship between the employer and the employee according to the law. Unpaid overtime? Mmmm... it's not going to happen. Firing someone just because the manager doesn't like him? Nahhh.... Abusive boss? Mmm... Lets talk with him about the consequences of a Lawsuit for Bullying.
Of course, if an employee did something really wrong, there was not much the Union could do for him.
But the main thing is that the employee is always in inferiority when dealing with the employer, and the Unions are there to solve that.
Aside from labour issues and collective bargaining over employees getting "shafted", unions are the first to pick up unsafe working practices. As software and tech in general ingrains itself into society the risk of deadly mistakes becomes ever greater - people already die due to bugs, and we can't remove the possibility entirely but we should be damn sure when the finger is pointed at our profession that we've got it covered. The free market typically doesn't cause this kind of enlightenment.
I may be misunderstanding your point, but you appear to suggest that union workers are at more of a risk than non-union. The link you provided (addressing only mining unions, not all unions) says exactly the opposite:
"Looking at these data, only in 2001 were there disproportionately more fatalities (39 percent) in union mines (unions represented 30 percent of coal miners that year) than in non-union mines. Recent figures are more typical. In 2006 through 2009 union mines accounted for 10, 6, 10 and 5 percent, respectively, of all coal mine deaths, but over that period unions represented 15 to 22 percent of coal miners. For those years unionized miners appear to have been one-fourth to one-half as likely to be killed in mine incidents as their non-union peers."
This is not evidence that unions make labour more dangerous.
The last paragraph even in your link is this;
"Tougher enforcement of laws, with higher penalties, and stronger safety standards are essential. But unionized miners have the power to enforce those standards before there's an accident, and they can prevent the speed-ups, overwork, and shortcuts that are common in non-union mines, like Upper Big Branch, and that contribute to the dangers of the job.
If Congress and Obama want to do something to save miners' lives, they should first of all protect and strengthen their right to organize."
Sorry didn't realise this didn't translate well. I was saying that unions are an important element in worker safety. Miners unions largely have to protect the miners themselves, but software is a discipline where we are much more likely to inflict problems on the general public rather than ourselves.
When toyota released the Camry they probably thought that the software was good enough and the risk was "low". Typically people that put their children and loved ones in these kinds of situations though want the risk to be "as absolutely close to zero as possible". The market alone cannot enforce that kind of behaviour is all I was trying to say - that and unions may play a role in promoting this kind of best practice.
High performers lose high compensation relative to the mean engineer.
There are plenty more arguable things you can say engineers lose (stock option value with lost company competitiveness, etc) but I'm not going to bother with those. The top two are not arguable, which is enough to invalidate a simplistic clickbait title.
You're not counting the losses that would be negated by the union: low median engineer salary, low turnover, anti-competitive clauses, no overtime, terrible ranking schemes, low chance of advancement compared to management.
Not sure if being located in the bay area is a straight-up loss for everyone—it's necessary for some businesses—but I would argue ratio of salary to median annual rent should be included. You should not have to move to the earth's anus to find employment.
Finally, those stupid fucking engineers who are "high performers", whatever that means, unfairly weight compensation packages, lowering average salary, and draining the market of competition, and encouraging "investing" in acquihires and getting nothing in return. I'm looking at you, Sparrow. You were supposed to fix gmail and it ended up getting worse to the tune of millions of dollars.
So you have two points, but you haven't addressed whether it's a net loss. Very few things in the world are truly free.
Unions can fight this alot more effectively than engineers can.
The simple fact is the large companies willingly and with full knowledge of the illegality, abuse their position, even when it comes to software engineers. Pretending you are protected when you can't afford a 6 figure lawsuit, isn't really true.
How does this address either of my points? I do not want to get in a wider debate about unionization, I am stating that the title is clickbait and obviously false.
Can you explain how it is mandatory for wages to be part of the collective bargaining agreement? It is my understanding that bargaining agreements can have nothing at all to do with compensation and instead on worker treatment or any other issues the workers may prioritize.
"Losing" union dues and receiving legal protection in return that likely won't take anywhere near as long to resolve as that court case did isn't "losing" given we know for a fact that these companies are willing to abuse their position to the point of engaging in illegal activity. We pay the police too, is that really "losing"?
Similarly, "high performers" aren't immune as they are the ones most affected since the various companies are going to try to recruit them from the others the most.
A union that provides legal representation and a standardized process for appealing various issues that are clearly illegal [e.g. The link I posted] before it goes to court is possible without you having to negotiate specific salary tiers and the like.
The clickbait hero has the superpower to comment on all the clickbaity titles, denouncing the content (of said title) as a wretched hive of scum and villainy!
Such a shame about the fear of long texts and coherent arguments though...
Baseball players are an even better example than Hollywood. Here's a list of MLB's best-paid player each year: http://sabr.org/research/mlbs-annual-salary-leaders-1874-201... - can you spot where the MLBPA under Marvin Miller won free agency? Meanwhile they got the minimum raised from $6k to $10k.
> All they get in return is a salary that is above industry average.
I've always wondered if that's actually true. Typically, unions form around well established businesses that are already dominating their market where the employees can clearly see the amount of money being made hand over fist.
This works great for employees whenever things are going great but cripples the company from adapting when things are going poorly. Hostess was a decent example of that.
In other words, Unions basically seem to form to take advantage of a good situation so when they're able to extract higher salaries from the company it's because they are already at very successful companies.
That would seem to imbalance the sample data because you'd need to compare them to all of the other non-unionized equivalently successful companies for a real comparison rather than the entire industry including small players.
Hostess is a really bad example for why unions are bad. Hostess suffered from several non-union related problems such as repeatedly selling off profitable assets, failure to update their product line to keep up with trends, and repeated raises for management while the company continued to decline [0]. I can't find a relevant article to site right now but iirc the unions had already made significant concessions previously (I think it was during Hostess' previous bankruptcy). Hostess failed for many reasons and mismanagement was at least as big a problem as labour costs.
>This works great for employees whenever things are going great but cripples the company from adapting when things are going poorly. Hostess was a decent example of that.
Hostess was a prime example of management making a slew of terrible decisions and then trying to foist the results of their failure on to the workers while giving themselves fat bonuses.
Towards the end the deal they were offered was so shit that they didn't care that striking made the company go under. And why should they? If the company goes under they just go and get another job.
The private equity firm that got in on that deal with a view to union busting for profit got everything it deserved when they lost their money.
Your second point assumes that high performers are both a) identifiable and b) are rewarded with higher levels of compensation currently. I'm not sure how we could quantify that, but I'm not convinced either is true.
(All that said, I'm not fired up about unionization as a software professional)
When anyone uses "Everyone", "Always", "Never" etc it creates strong signaling that the writer is an idealist and not looking at the issue at hand pragmatically. I would find it unlikely that "Everyone" loses. I'm not saying that you are, but wanted to let you know that when you use terms like that many people will discredit the rest of your message.
Do you mean like this?[1] Also, I was unaware of any laws that required unions to charge dues. It is true that many do, but one can certainly create a union without dues.
Right to work is completely different. Right to work says that employees are not compelled to JOIN a union in the first place. I have never heard of a union where some employees are required to pay dues and others aren't (and in fact, I have never heard of a union where employees pay no dues at all.)
How would selective dues even work? If the union requires dues you either pay and are represented or you don't join (go work somewhere non-union). I'm struggling to figure out where it would even make sense to be selective.
unions are great when people want a paycheck but don't want the need to perform to be a part of the equation. I can see why that's tempting for a certain mindset, but it's a clear loser in every way except tickling those populist "worker" nerves so many seem to have.
I can't speak much for unions in the US, but in Argentina, unions eliminated child labor, introduced paid time off and reduced working hours from 90 to 40-50hs a week. When they protested for these things we consider today to be only reasonable, the conservative power at the time repressed public manifestations killing dozens of protesters.
In the US, union leaders were forced to make a sworn statement regarding their political inclinations.
Unions in the US are viewed very negatively, but as a political institution, it does solve some issues. I don't think a world without unions is a better world, though I wish they behaved more transparently than they do.
Yeah, SAG has really stopped actors from performing. George Clooney just sits on his ass all day running out the clock until he can collect his paycheck. /s
I have no comment on the stuff about unions.