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| ▲ | al_borland 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Not just that, but the union would likely end up capping their salary much lower so the wealth can be spread around. How hard is the 10x engineer on the team going to work when the compensation is the same regardless? This is where people end up working multiple jobs, if they can keep up with their peers only working one day per week. | | |
| ▲ | theshrike79 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Why the fuck would an union cap anyones salary? Is this an American thing? Over here the purpose of unions is to: Provide a strong enough legal response and guidance to deter companies from trying shady shit, pay better unemployment fees than the government and provide training/networking. They also negotiate collectively with the employers on behalf of everyone for things like paid sick leave, paid vacations etc. I pay a flat fee every month because the union I'm in has always had relatively low unemployment, for others it's usually a percentage of their monthly gross salary (usually around 10-50€). In what scenario would capping people's salary be good for the workers? | | |
| ▲ | joe_mamba 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | >Why the fuck would an union cap anyones salary? Is this an American thing? No, it's a thing in most of Europe like France or Germany for unionized trades. All trades there have publicly documented salary bands based on education and YoE per job, where the negotiations starting point for a wage for a position must not be below the minimum threshold but also can't exceed a certain upper threshold. In some cases, the company can decide to place you outside the union agreed tariff/band range to give you a higher wage, but then you might be exempt from some strict union rules like 35h/week working hours and such. And they cap the top end of the salary bands because the yearly budget for wage increases is a fixed pie for most companies, and so to have money left to give entry level workers the great wage increases as mandated for by unions, they need to cap the increases to the top wages to prevent bleeding/bankruptcy. Do you think all European companies have unlimited money to give all their workers X% wage increases? This is how it works in Austria. |
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| ▲ | array_key_first 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think the truth is that there really isn't 10xers, and that's more or less a propaganda technique to get people to crab bucket each other. Of course everyone likes to think they're santa's special engineer, so they don't need hurdles like protections and a level playing field. But, simultaneously, the industry has been doing everything in its power to make engineers as fungible as possible. The "wet dream" is to make engineers practically assembly line workers - you can just plop some rando in at any time, and it'll probably be fine. You can see this with the extreme turnover in a lot of the industry. These concepts are in almost perfection contradiction, but they both have the same goal: to convince you and me that the status quo is desirable for each of us personally. | |
| ▲ | Buttons840 24 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Reminder that unions don't have to do anything about salary. I'd love a tech union that simply says: Every time an on-call engineer has to work during off-hours, they get compensated 4x that time in PTO, and that PTO must be used during the next 30 days, or it is paid out at 20x their normal hourly rate. This ensures everyone shares in the burden of off-hours work. If off-hours work is happening often, then engineers are going to be spending a lot of time away on PTO, and if the company pressures them to not take the PTO, then the company is going to be paying them a lot. Let's align incentives, I don't want to work on off-hours emergencies, and the company doesn't want me to either. No mention of pay anywhere. Unions can do a lot of good without ever touching pay. | |
| ▲ | denkmoon 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's right, no more "10xers" working 80 hr weeks making those who can't or won't look unproductive. | |
| ▲ | KittenInABox 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Couldn't unions just follow actors' guilds and the like where there are no salary caps? | | |
| ▲ | karaterobot 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | When we're looking to the actors guilds for direction, you know the future of our industry might be in trouble. |
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| ▲ | data-ottawa 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I find it hard to believe workers would vote for a union to lower or cap their wages. That feels like a total straw man. In my experience unions suck when they overemphasize fairness over real world practicalities (see almost anything seniority based). They don't have to be that way. |
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| ▲ | Herring 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Again see Steve. Something can look like a good position and still rapidly deteriorate. This one wasn’t that rapid either, you had plenty of warning. I remember discussing inequality with friends in 2014, and probably knew about it since Occupy Wall Street (2011). Or earlier. | | |
| ▲ | bob001 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Engineers were the privileged class. They were part of the group occupy wall street wanted to bring down. Not hard to guess why they didn't want that. | | |
| ▲ | nebula8804 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Privileged is too generic of a word that does not accurately describe the cohorts. There is the capital class. Occupy was after the Capital class but im not sure if they accurately zeroed in on that. Its been too long since then. Engineers were never part of that class. They work for a living while capital owns assets that work for them. Engineers were part of the "Intellectual Elite" class that made good money but were super socially progressive. (Think putting BLM signs in their yards while at the same time pricing out the people they claim to help). They ended up becoming a lot of the Elizabeth Warren cohort after being the Hillary and Obama cohorts(before it fractured into part Bernie part MAGA with the rest going to Hillary). Extremely socially progressive but don't you dare touch economics. | | |
| ▲ | bob001 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Having talked to Occupy Wall Street people at the time I don't think many on the ground differentiated as much as you think they did. I used a generic word because from my experience that is how they saw the world. I got told I deserved to have everything I own set on fire for saying I spent $100 on a nice dinner once. That was on the more extreme side but the sentiment seemed to not differentiate. | | |
| ▲ | reactordev 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They basically hated on anyone making more than a livable wage at the time ($60k). | | |
| ▲ | mcny 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | It is possible they were mistaken.
The extreme voices get magnified at these things, I'd guess. Maybe it is an attempt to slow the shift in the Overton window? |
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| ▲ | nebula8804 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You missed what I said in my first paragraph. Occupy was after the capital class but they did not express it well. Looking back, a common criticism was that the movement was leaderless and thus unorganized. It was the early days of a new generation (Millennials) getting a first taste of the coming disaster their lives were going to be. The last time there was really a movement like that was the 1999 WTO protests...more than a decade separated from Occupy and it being a pivotal moment for Gen X to realize the same lessons millennials learned in Occupy. Since Occupy, a movement consisting of many of the same people who were disorganized in 2011 started to learn the ropes and become organized, first in the realignment of Labor (SEIU starting a "Fight for 15$" in 2012/2013), then the emergence of BLM in 2013(Yes they started back in 2013) as a result of death of Eric Garner and the Ferguson rallies among other events, to finally Sanders running in 2015 and the emergence of a semi organized movement combining various progressives groups (economic & social progressives). This led to the whole saga in 2016 which there is plenty of youtube documentaries about to the wave election in 2018 (of which there is an amazing netflix movie about) to the showdown in 2020 between Bernie and Biden, to winding up wandering the political woods for years after Biden managed to hold on to now finally electing Mamdani as a Democratic Socialist in the largest city and the financial capital where Occupy started. From 2011 starting as a completely unorganized group to running the finance capital of America in just 15 years. Amazing! |
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| ▲ | mothballed 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I would say more precisely, engineers are closer to the managerial or capital wielding class; usually the adversary of the union. | | |
| ▲ | nebula8804 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They are closer but they are not part of the class so does it really matter how close they are? Engineer still has to trade their time for wealth in the form of work. Capital class has assets that work for them. | | |
| ▲ | bob001 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | To me the only question is if there's a hypothetical revolution who will end up swinging in the wind by their neck and I have no doubt many engineers working for big tech would have been in that group. There's always nice rhetoric and focused rhetoric to not make too many enemies but the people on the ground differentiate a lot less and have in every revolution. | | |
| ▲ | nebula8804 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | By the time there is a revolution, i'd imagine that most engineers will have fallen to the working classes where they are technically a part of. Again, they are not part of the capital class. They were lucky to come across a special moment in time where there was a paradigm shift bringing with it enormous wealth and the capital class did not part with some of their wealth out of charity but out of greed because they realized that in order to capture this new found fountain of wealth they needed engineers...at least for the time being. This allowed one generation (maybe two) to live a dignified solid upper middle class life but since the beginning there has always been a push to eliminate them. Things such as low/no code, "learn to code", bootcamps, and now AI are attempts to destroy this avenue for people to rise above anything more than just worker class. | | |
| ▲ | ahf8Aithaex7Nai 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Again, they are not part of the capital class. I vaguely remember reading something recently, probably by Branko Milanović, about how there is a class of workers in the tech sector who earn so much money that they are gradually starting to become capitalists. When you have so much money left over that you can start putting your capital to work for you, you cross that very line. I don't mean a home savings plan or ETFs or anything like that, but if you have seven figures and can skim off returns that you could live well on, then you're definitely no longer working class. | |
| ▲ | lqstuart 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s so depressing how right you are | | |
| ▲ | nebula8804 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well on a positive note, it may eventually lead to a union or works council for technologists. Will coders be a part of that or will that skill set go the way of carpenter? Remains to be seen. But there is still other roles in tech that could take the place of coders (infrastructure, security etc.). Also remains to be seen how long this process will take. Could take a decade or two but hopefully it will happen. Its just so nice to see little wins like a Democratic Socialist like Mamdani getting elected in the finance capital of America. It shows that people are slowly chipping away at the capital class and sooner or later they will have to throw us some breadcrumbs. | | |
| ▲ | joe_mamba 17 minutes ago | parent [-] | | >Well on a positive note, it may eventually lead to a union or works council for technologists. Good luck fighting offshoring. > It shows that people are slowly chipping away at the capital class and sooner or later they will have to throw us some breadcrumbs. That means nothing.
I'd be surprised if he can implement 10% of what he promised in his campaign or if he's just gonna be another plant of the capital class that promises impossible things but then ends up doing nothing when the finances hit the road. |
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| ▲ | 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | OhMeadhbh 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | i disagree. i also disagree that most people developing tech solutions for startups are engineers or are applying an engineering discipline. but i would agree that the majority of people in valley tech firms are closer to the rentier class than they are to working engineers. |
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| ▲ | mji 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Until recently? Now it's 20x at the AI labs instead of 5x at FAANG. | |
| ▲ | nonethewiser 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Still do |
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