Tech Workers' Values
blog.samaltman.comWe believe that employees should come together and clearly define the values and policies they'd like to see their companies uphold. A tech union isn't the perfect metaphor for this, but it's not far off.
If it's going to do anything but be window dressing then it needs to have the teeth of union - so just call it what it is.
I've argued for a while that tech workers need a union, but the chorus on HN and other places is "we're too special for a union." Which is bogus on it's face - otherwise SAG for example wouldn't exist.
If this moves the needle on a union then great, but I'm wary of the source being a pure power move (which all unions are - rightfully). I think whomever leads this needs to be above reproach in every sense as an advocate for the tiny introverted developer.
edit: I should note that the reason SAG worked is because some of the highest profile actors joined in the early days and arranged to collectively bargain for the rest of the group. It will probably work best if you get the top 50 most high profile developers (Eg. Carmack) to join and then advocate for the small guy. Sadly, in reality, a union is only as good as it's most high profile members.
> If it's going to do anything but be window dressing then it needs to have the teeth of union - so just call it what it is.
This sounds like it's going to have exactly zero to do with what a labor union would normally be concerned with -- pay, working conditions, etc. Instead, I have a strong suspicion this is going to be some sort of enumeration of the progressive ideals that all tech workers "should" be concerned with, as dictated by a group of Bay Area tech workers. Namely, LGBT stuff, female and minority representation, immigrant's rights, etc.
I don't see what that would really accomplish, though. All companies already publicly advertise the 'moral' beliefs you mentioned, yet continue hiring white male whiteboard challenge mavericks.
No, not all companies. Many still follow the age-old wisdom of staying out of the social commentary business. I think the goal of this endeavor is to change that by convincing the tech workers to create a culture of doing so where it didn't exist before.
The only age-old wisdom I remember from my great-grandfather is "never trust the British, and kill every French on sight".
Regarding this issue, I'll stop demanding that corporations act morally above and beyond what the law requires when they seize to influence those laws.
This feels like a very political move that has little to nothing to do with tech. If you build a union or trade organization which has influence over the biggest CEOs in the world, you have consolidated a lot of power.
I'm left scratching my head after reading this, and I feel like YC may have lost its way.
> yet continue hiring white male whiteboard challenge mavericks.
Is that even true? Are you counting Asians and light-complexioned immigrants the same as American white people in this context?
Here's the kind of thing it could accomplish:
https://www.recode.net/2017/2/2/14490950/travis-kalanick-ube...
If tech workers express collective displeasure about a company, it meaningfully hurts that company's ability to recruit/retain tech workers.
> Namely, LGBT stuff, female and minority representation, immigrant's rights, etc.
offering parental leave is an excellent example of the kind of thing a union would negotiate, and is also pretty well related to how attractive a company is to women (who are more likely to have childcare responsibilities). Rules against firing someone for being gay or a different religion are a great example of something a union would negotiate, and are definitely going to help increase minority and LGBT representation. Why do you see 'working conditions' as unrelated to these topics?
> Rules against firing someone for being gay or a different religion are a great example of something a union would negotiate
Except they're not, that's what our existing laws are for.
> Why do you see 'working conditions' as unrelated to these topics?
Because in my reading of this it doesn't sound like they're going after things like vacation time, pay, IP rights, you know, day-to-day stuff that a union would really be concerned with.
Instead it sounds like they want to define a shared set of principles that tech workers should believe in and then through sheer numbers said workers would convince their employers to be more socially conscious.
So again, I'd be shocked if the results of this were anything other than "A real tech worker believes in the right to an abortion, a real tech worker believes in gay marriage", etc. instead of, say, "a real tech worker believes in a minimum of four weeks paid leave" and similar statements.
tl;dr it's gonna be a bunch of touchy-freely Bay Area stuff.
> > Rules against firing someone for being gay or a different religion are a great example of something a union would negotiate
> Except they're not, that's what our existing laws are for.
Ironically, unions are allowed to terminate memberships for reasons that would be illegal to use as grounds for firing someone[0]. In a closed shop, terminating a membership is tantamount to firing someone, so that literally means employees covered by a closed-shop union contract have less recourse if the union decides to fire them than they would if they never had a union contract to begin with.
Also, a democratically-elected body will (in theory) represent the majority of people whom it governs. If a majority of people want to target a minority religion or race or ethnicity, a democratically-elected body representing them will do just that. Unions actually have a long history of lobbying for unbelievably racist laws throughout the 20th century in order to protect their majority-white members[1].
I know this is unpopular to say here, but as someone belonging to a group that was explicitly targeted by these unions as a scapegoat, and who had their US citizenships revoked and property seized due to successful, xenophobic lobbying by those unions, I'm really sick of the pervasive assumption that unions will inherently protect minorities, or even minority members.
[0] This includes retaliatory termination
[1] The AFL is the most well-known of these, but they weren't the only ones.
It's legal in 28 states to fire someone for being gay. 32 for being trans. Some have even preempted local nondiscrimination ordinances.
I agree with you that this doesn't seem to have anything to do with working conditions. I don't see why you think they'd want to go anywhere near abortion.
> touchy-freely Bay Area stuff
I don't think those beliefs are exclusive to the Bay Area, nor would I describe those topics as "touchy-freely [sic]".
> offering parental leave is an excellent example of the kind of thing a union would negotiate, and is also pretty well related to how attractive a company is to women (who are more likely to have childcare responsibilities).
This is an excellent example of how women make different choices to men driven by the special rights that they are afforded. Giving a women more maternity leave sounds laudable but it creates a perverse incentive where they have to take on those childcare duties.
My wife and I are going through this at the moment and she will be entitled to 5 months of full-paid maternity leave. No employment contract I've ever signed has even come close to that for paternity leave. The only rational decision is for her to take care of the child.
I'm much more in favour of some sort of system where that leave is allocated to a family and how they choose to divide it is up to them.
I said "parental leave" and not "maternity leave" quite deliberately.
Well, if a professional organization of tech workers actually managed to hold some sway in DC, it would be an improvement over the status quo at the moment.
My main objection to unions is that, once they're in a company, employees lose the right to negotiate their own compensation. I want to be able to skip my union dues and deal directly with the company. OR I want to be able to make a union of my own, especially for a functional or values-based subset of coworkers, and have us negotiate separately.
This is not just a tech-unions-related complaint, this is a critique of unions as a whole. But yeah.
I think that tech workers are in a special place because we have a lot of disposable income. I've gotten over my college-era "can't pay for anything" attitude, and I'm willing to pay for content that could be gotten for free. Entertainment was the first one, but now I'm also supporting some people on patreon and donating to causes. We don't need a union to drive that-- we can just remind tech workers that if we all donate a little, we can make big changes.
>My main objection to unions is that, once they're in a company, employees lose the right to negotiate their own compensation. I want to be able to skip my union dues and deal directly with the company. OR I want to be able to make a union of my own, especially for a functional or values-based subset of coworkers, and have us negotiate separately.
Bargaining collectively is the whole point of creating a union in the first place. This special snowflake mentality that permeates the tech sector and the myopic individualism is a giant problem.
Contrarily, the special snowflake and myopic individualism is what MADE the tech industry. The hubris to say, "I see a better way" or "I can do it better than that person" is how we got here. In point of fact, this entire thing is basically another form of "snowflake individualism".
I am starting to think the giant problem in tech is really attitudes which are dismissive of our differences and our experiences. Tropes about "tech-bros" and "millennials" are rooted in the very same biases that they're railing against.
It's just another face of tribalism.
The moment someone removes my individual right to negotiate is the moment I hand in my resignation and go work somewhere that I do have that right.
I will NOT have my coworkers voting on what is "fair" for me to be payed, based on BS metrics like "seniority".
If unions were so great, then how come I make more money than any other union based engineering position?
I have done just fine negotiating my salary on my own, thank you very much.
>I have done just fine negotiating my salary on my own, thank you very much.
And many, many other people haven't. Those people will unionize and won't care a lick to see you go.
Awesome. They can do that, and I will work for the multitude of companies and startups out there that will not unionize.
You can't unionize every startup in the world, and non unionized employees will be able to demand a premium.
Other people are free to burden themselves with union rules, and I will be free to accept the higher salary that I can command because my competition is hindered.
It is a competitive advantage to not be burdened by union rules.
It's people like this commenter who need to be won over if a union would have any chance in tech. But I don't know how to do it. At my first ever job everybody at the company was an automatic member of a union (it was a grocery store in my home town). I knew that when I took a paid break, or a vacation, or got time and a half for night work, I was benefiting from industrial action taken by those who went before me. I remember being a kid and seeing my aunt and her coworkers picketing over a pay dispute. I made better money because it was not just me negotiating on my own, other people went without pay to force the company to do better. It was and remains a successful chain. Currently I support people with disabilities who work in similar jobs and are protected by the "burden" of union rules.
I wonder if tech contains too many people who think they are too smart to get screwed to gain critical mass for a union. Maybe everybody thinks they have a competitive advantage... What's weird is that this is also how the employers like it. So is everybody winning, or does one side just think they are? I have never before heard the complaint that unions reduce wages. Maybe I'm missing something because employers should be all for that!
There's a difference between what's best for the group and what's best for individual members of the group. This conflict comes up over and over again, as it arises from straightforward principles from game theory.
If everyone bargains collectively, overall compensation goes up as companies have much worse alternatives to negotiated agreement. However, these companies are generally very willing to bribe people into breaking solidarity, and so it's often personally lucrative to be the scab crossing picket lines.
I don't know. Picket lines are a really specific situation. I don't think companies are motivated in normal times to pay more to non-union workers. What exactly would they be paying for? You are right about the general tension between group and individual rewards for choices. It goes beyond unions as you mention. I do think some unions do OK in this regard- actors and musicians are not held back on individual income but still benefit from industry standards negotiated by unions.
>It goes beyond unions as you mention.
Yeah, and it gets really interesting when you look at examples from evolutionary biology, too. There's a pretty common population dynamic that goes on between "punish non-cooperation with some version of tit-for-tat" and "always cooperate because others will punish defectors" and "exploit others because there's enough non-cooperators for this to work as a strategy".
In normal times, companies don't pay more to non-union workers - but the company pays the same, and non-union workers get the benefits that union workers fought for, and the non-union folks don't have to pay union dues and the like. There's a very real reason why unions work to make themselves non-optional, and why businesses favor laws that enshrine a right to not pay union dues.
Winning me over is easy.
Give me a better deal.
If the union job pays 50% more then I will take it. I'd have to be stupid not to.
But don't expect my loyalty to the union. As soon as it become a better deal to do something else, I am going to do that thing.
I don't care about solidarity, or "crossing the picket line" or whatever. I will take the best deal that is offered to me.
That is really surprisingly self-sabotaging. People in labor movements don't spout slogans like, "An injury to one is an injury to all" because we're trying to moralize.
It's because when workers at one company have their salaries suppressed - by collusion in hiring, by wage theft, by death-march management - the market rate for their labor goes down overall. When any one company can abuse its workers, we all lose from that injury to the labor market we all share, as well as from the lost productivity from sub-optimal allocation of labor.
Then these people who don't want me to sabotage their movement shouldnt force me to join.
They should leave me alone and not get in the way of the contract that is between me and my employer.
If they force me to join with BS closed shop contracts, they can expect me to explicitly and purposefully sabotage their movement in any way that I deem fit.
They do not represent me. I do not want their help. I do not want them to negotiate for me.
And hopefully these people who do not represent me will learn their lesson with regards to forcing people to join their movement, knowing that they can expect purposeful sabotage in retaliation.
Crossing a picket line is kind of a moral choice where you decide how much value you place on A) the success of that particular strike and B) ever having anything to do with those picketers again. It is weird to talk about in terms of tech, but nevertheless, if there is a union that represents you, ignoring a strike would probably not be free, it would just be a different kind of cost. Maybe how many numbers you get at the end of the day is the only value you care about. I think, beyond a certain minimum salary, regard for your impact on other humans becomes relevant to many of us in the choices we make. Or things like work environment or hours, which unions safeguard. Would you work in a less safe environment to make your take home number 5% bigger? Or, indeed, tolerate greater risk to somebody else for more pay for you? "The best deal" can be a lot of things.
> if there is a union that represents you, ignoring a strike would probably not be free, it would just be a different kind of cost
To elaborate on what that cost would be: If a union represents you, it can compel you to go on strike (even for a cause to which you object on ethical or moral grounds).
If you refuse, they can terminate your membership. For a closed shop, that's equivalent to firing you.
Indeed- person I replied to does not care about that though, because they will get a better deal. Losing union membership doesn't matter in their imagined tech union.
While I am saying that collective bargaining is an important tool to increase workers' negotiating power, I'm not defending every specific implementation. I admire businesses who work with union employees because it implies that the power relationship is at least somewhat in balance, and workers are represented. I don't know if that also means I support "closed shops" where if somebody leaves the union they lose their job... But it sounds like maybe in supporting one I'm implicitly supporting the other.
Thanks for the comment.
>You can't unionize every startup in the world, and non unionized employees will be able to demand a premium.
Empirically, this is completely untrue. Union workers have higher compensation than nonunion workers overall.
>It is a competitive advantage to not be burdened by union rules.
Doesn't look like that to me. Unions don't just have advantages in terms of salaries; they have the advantage of helping to grease the wheels between companies, between jobs for the unemployed, and between skillsets. Unions are an important source of job-training for an ever-changing field like tech.
Why pay for a web-programming bootcamp if your union dues entitle you to one?
You seem to be operating from a world where there unionization in tech even exists, and making assumptions that tech unions behave exactly the same as they have in different industries.
In Germany you can negotiate your pay within the union payscale. You can ask the employer to move you up a level. There is nothing stopping them from doing that. Once you have reached the top you are "Ausser Tarif" and can negotiate your salary .
The union mainly defines a bottom level salary and also gives a defined path upwards. For most people this is a nice system for a long career.
You can create a union to reflect whatever values (e.g. negotiating compensation) you see fit. Don't believe the narratives proffered by anti-union forces for their own benefit. Actors are all in unions and employ an entire sub-class of workers (agents) to negotiate compensation for them.
Cool. How about we base this union on the values of not forcing people to join it?
I'd be OK with that. Please keep these efforts focused on voluntary interactions.
A union can't force you to join it so in that regard it's completely voluntary.
It does however pressure companies to only hire union workers, or pressure the government to give preference to union workers. That's the whole point of a union, to check and co-opt the monopoly/oligopolic power of corporations and the government and giving it to the collective workers.
You might philosophically disagree with that approach and think that a more anarchic market is better, but a union is not a violent coercive group.
because then it has no power.
That's the whole point. Individuals have no power. You can fool yourself into thinking that extra 20k a year you managed to get is power.
You guys do your own thing and I'll do mine.
We'll see who comes out on top with the better job.
The power that I have is the ability to up and leave and go somewhere else that offers me a better deal.
And I will absolutely use my power of leaving if a group every tries to force me to join a union.
No you won't. You can get bored at lunch and just not come back if you want.
Things have worked out quite well for me.
The same cannot be said for those trying to force everyone in tech to join a union. Every month I see some hacker new medium post about it, and they never go anywhere.
Well the whole idea of trade associations and unions has it's roots in anarchic-socialism. The idea being that collective bargaining lifts the floor for the worker.
The idea here is that the person at the top with outsized bargaining power is voluntarily relinquishing it to the person at the bottom in order to increase general welfare.
If you don't believe in that, then that's great, but that's kind of the direction everyone seems to be headed.
Even that "top" person might gain bargaining power by being part of a collective.
> employees lose the right to negotiate their own compensation.
I have never heard of that. Why would that be?
In some US states, unions are allowed to agree on so-called "union security" rules in their negotiations with employers. These require all employees covered by the union's agreements to be members.
Other, so-called "right-to-work" states have outlawed the practice.
The clauses make sense for the union and their members because you cannot restrict the benefits of union representation to only members. That creates "free-rider" problems. The opposite argument is about freedoms of contract and association.
I'm unsure if you are typically allowed to make your own agreements with the employer when there's union representation. That's probably defined in negotiation, and whatever has traditionally been agreed upon for steelworkers etc. may not be the best model for tech workers.
> I'm unsure if you are typically allowed to make your own agreements with the employer when there's union representation.
No, in closed shop contracts, this is expressly prohibited. Violating this and negotiating with your employer directly could be considered grounds for termination of union membership (ie, termination of employment). The employer would also face consequences as well.
> whatever has traditionally been agreed upon for steelworkers etc. may not be the best model for tech workers.
That's true - unfortunately, the NLRA (the law which regulates union operations) is very rigid, and it does not provide different stipulations for different industries.
There's a reason that virtually all NLRA-regulated unions in each state enact the same corporate policies for membership, the same contract structures, etc. - those are the ones which turn out to provide a stable (in the literal sense) balance of power under the laws.
It's very unlikely that an NLRA-regulated union in the tech industry would operate differently, in the long run, from the NLRA-regulated unions in every other industry.
At my last job(not tech), our wages were negotiated with the union at a much lower rate than our competitors and owed dues. We had no control because the union was "representing" us and we could take it or quit.
Yes. Mandatory unions (And be careful about how you define that, because many would claim they're not while still requiring their pound of flesh[1]) are signified by their monopoly on labor.
By maintaining a chokehold on who can supply a vital resource (labor) to businesses, Unions have a history of strangling their patrons - See Detroit. From a distributed systems perspective, Unions represent a single point of failure.
I'm entirely in favor of groups banding together to request, nee, demand, rights, pay increases, healthcare. Once they start having 'management' tiers of their own, they're no longer representing you - They're a corporation you work for, contracting to your nominal employer. Just being clearer about it doesn't work - Microsoft hires an army of 'contractors' who are abused in precisely the same way. Nor does having multiple competing pseudo-unions - There's dozens of headhunters to go through to work for microsoft, but they all compete on 'price' and drive wages down[2].
[1]http://www.nrtw.org/required-join-pay-teacher/ - "educators cannot be required to do more than pay a union fee (typically called an "agency fee") that equals their share of what the union can prove is its costs of collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance adjustment" - Which is to say, you don't have to join the union, they just get to negotiate for you, take a cut of your pay, and be the intermediary that represents you - While you've proved your disloyalty to them by not choosing to 'join' them, so they have no actual incentive to do so. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrichs_v._California_Teach...
[2] The lightly fictionalized https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs, which still rings very true more than 20 years later.
US jurisprudence requires unions to represent non-members whether they want to or not. I don't like agency fees, but they're a response to a free-rider problem.
Yes, a union is pretty much a corporation that supplies labor. The biggest difference is how they're governed. Nobody bats an eye if a supplier negotiates an exclusive contract.
Agreed. I think exclusive supplier contracts are pretty dumb, too - At least without clauses for 'Price match or get out'. And the solution to the former should be (and I'll admit this is a stretch) to fix that problem, or better yet: simply to make your union's services so attractive and obviously a public good that the significant majority want to be sure it sticks around. Yes, the free rider problem is universal - Unions cause it as much as suffer from it (ever heard of unions suffering from deadweight because of seniority rules? No, nobody else ever has either :P)
Whatever you or I think about exclusive supplier contracts, is there a single state that forbids them except for unions?
Seniority rules are something unions negotiate for. Contracting firms stick warm bodies on projects all the time. That's between the supplier and the customer, not imposed by the federal government.
I agree it would be better to fix that, but as you said, it's a stretch. Good luck getting Republicans or Democrats to go for it.
> US jurisprudence requires unions to represent non-members whether they want to or not. I don't like agency fees, but they're a response to a free-rider problem.
They get around that by structuring all of the benefits in the employment contracts to cover only their members, and by negotiating exclusive employment contracts with employers (so that there are no non-members).
Put another way, 94% of people who are represented by an NLRB-governed union never had the opportunity to vote for or against union membership in the first place. Most of those are employed by employers with exclusive contracts ("closed shop"), and because the union itself is not required to stand for reelection (its representatives are, but the union basically guaranteed permanent representation[0]), it means that free-riders are a non-issue.
[0] The process of decertifying or deauthorizing a union is very strictly regulated and unions have very broad leeway in preventing it, so it almost never happens except in cases of criminal misconduct and the like.
The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation considers anything but "open shop" to be "forced unionism" and lists 28 states as free from that scourge.[1] No exclusive contracts, no agency fees.
> The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation considers anything but "open shop" to be "forced unionism" and lists 28 states as free from that scourge.[1] No exclusive contracts, no agency fees.
I think you're conflating open shops and right-to-work laws, but besides that, the point is that there is no free rider problem even in states with right-to-work laws, because the union can structure their contracts with the employer so that non-members don't receive any benefits. Sure, they'll represent non-members, but there aren't any reasons the non-members would ever need them to, because the benefits literally would not apply in the first place.
Unions don't really talk about this, because the free-rider problem is a convincing argument to use in favor of mandatory dues withholding, but in reality it's an issue that they already have the tools to avoid.
NRTW's definition of "right to work" appears to be the common definition. It's also the common definition of "open shop".
Minority unions can bargain only for their members -- but as far as I can tell, members can't commit to be bound by the outcome, which undermines the union's bargaining power. Even then, the prevailing legal opinion seems to be that they can't negotiate terms that structurally favor members over non-members.
Majority unions have to represent all workers in a bargaining unit, members or not.
> NRTW's definition of "right to work" appears to be the common definition. It's also the common definition of "open shop".
Not quite, because you can have an open shop in a state that doesn't have a right-to-work law. Right to work laws only ensure that workers have the ability to dissociate from the union without losing their employment.
> Minority unions can bargain only for their members -- but as far as I can tell, members can't commit to be bound by the outcome, which undermines the union's bargaining power.
Alternative way of phrasing that: Only unions which represent the majority have the ability to compel all members to accept whatever terms they negotiate.
> Majority unions have to represent all workers in a bargaining unit
They have to represent them for things like grievances, yes, but that doesn't mean that they can't pick and choose which subgroups they advocate for in negotiations over others.
That's literally what negotiating is - you have to figure out what you're willing to give up in order to get what you value more. And a union with a heterogeneous membership will inevitably have to decide which group of members to prioritize over others.
The purpose of right-to-work laws is to limit their ability to marginalize minority members, because those minority members always have a second option that doesn't involve unemployment.
> you can have an open shop in a state that doesn't have a right-to-work law
"Right to work" laws are also called "open shop" laws because that's what they mandate. Of course unions can choose not to collect agency fees in other states.
Going back to the beginning, you claimed that unions can negotiate closed shops. The Taft-Hartley Act outlawed closed shops, NLRB v. General Motors made union shops equivalent to agency shops, and 28 states forbid agency shops.
> Alternative way of phrasing that: Only unions which represent the majority have the ability to compel all members to accept whatever terms they negotiate.
No, those statements aren't equivalent. Plenty of other negotiations see parties authorize their representatives to agree to terms within certain parameters. Plenty of contracts commit the parties to accept the result of some process.
> They have to represent them for things like grievances, yes, but that doesn't mean that they can't pick and choose which subgroups they advocate for in negotiations over others.
They can't choose members as one of those groups. If other groupings correlate with membership, sure, they can get away with some favoritism. You originally claimed they can exclude non-members entirely.
> Going back to the beginning, you claimed that unions can negotiate closed shops
This is a rather pedantic quibble. In the US, "closed shop" refers to post-entry closed shops, which are legal (except in states with right-to-work laws), as opposed to pre-entry closed shops (which is what Taft-Hartley outlawed nationwide).
Despite that ban, unions can still use tactics like hiring halls (even contractually mandated ones) to simulate the effects of a pre-entry closed shop, while still technically not running afoul of the letter of Taft-Hartley, but undermining the clear intent of it.
> No, those statements aren't equivalent. Plenty of other negotiations see parties authorize their representatives to agree to terms within certain parameters. Plenty of contracts commit the parties to accept the result of some process.
You're missing the point, which is that unions can compel people who never entered a contract with the union or authorized the union as their representative, as long as that person is a member of a bargaining unit for which the union has secured majority representation.
I only brought up the distinction between closed shop and union shop to cite sources. You can call them whatever you like. The Supreme Court says unions can't require actual membership, only fees, and in 28 states they can't require that either.
Hiring halls are subject to the same laws. Individual cases of discrimination can be hard to prove, but patterns are hard to defend.
Federal law sets the terms of union representation. Some union members would be happy to have collective bargaining for union members and individual bargaining for non-members, but that isn't an option.
Because they would need to join the union and the union negotiates compensation for everyone, that's one of the main purposes of a union.
And that's exactly why I will never join a union. As soon as that happens at any job I have, I will hand in my resignation the next day.
I can negotiate very well on my own, as opposed to being stuck into seniority "levels", thank you very much.
Plenty of unions and associations don't do this. A reasonable method for this would be for a union to negotiate per level salary bands, and yearly merit increases.
Within the band the company pays whatever they think you are worth.
The worst aspect isn't just the right to negotiate your own compensation but doing better work has no reward. Get any decent size shop and your going to have that one person if not two that everyone just carries.
then there is that asshole who becomes shop steward and well, you best hope you agree with them.
Yeah i am a bit jaded but no thanks. Let alone like it will matter because outsourcing will just become the standard means by which many companies will operate in a 24x7 world where talent to do IT can be anywhere. unlike your local plant our jobs can be done about from anywhere in the world. If you can work your job from home so can someone else
> Get any decent size shop and your going to have that one person if not two that everyone just carries.
> then there is that asshole who becomes shop steward and well, you best hope you agree with them.
But that happens in tech already! And usually that one person is friends with the boss, or a long-term employee who did good work once and is now coasting, or is really good at this one skill that the company doesn't particularly need any more and not at the current stuff, or is a 10x engineer because they spend their time dragging down nine coworkers, or whatever.
If anything, a union gives workers more ability to push back against that: I'm not going to call out the one guy the boss likes for being a jerk dragging down the business, because I know they'll find some way to get back. But if my coworkers contractually have my back, I'll be much more inclined to.
It seems apparent that you have never worked in a (traditional) union shop. Management still has power, union bosses have power, but union members end up with two bosses instead of one. Your coworkers aren't going to be able to help you vote out the shop steward who sucks because that is going to be the only name on the ballot.
But carry on with your starry-eyed idealism.
> My main objection to unions is that, once they're in a company, employees lose the right to negotiate their own compensation
So don't have the union do that.
Have the union worry about coming down on places that fire members for refusing to work 60 hours a week, want you to train your replacement, force shitty unpaid oncall schedules, etc...
> So don't have the union do that
Unfortunately, it's an all-or-nothing deal. The NLRA is a very rigid law, and once a union has been sanctioned as the exclusive representative of a bargaining unit, they have the authority to do that.
It's next to impossible to either decertify or deauthorize a union once it forms, so you not only have to trust the current leadership, but all future leadership that may get elected, to focus only on the things you list and not focus on negotiating your compensation for you.
What's in a name? Lawyers and doctors have unions, but they're called associations, but there's a test, with the full force of the law, for doctoring or lawyering without having passed their respective tests. Github's 'like' button has proved that we developers are just as vain (and lazy) as the next human, so I feel this has more of a chance to succeeded if we recognize that. Some of us take pride in thinking that we are better than plumbers, despite most of us merely being the digital equivalent.
The G in SAG doesn't stand for union.
I agree with the what (I think) the parent post is getting at: if you're going to form a union, form a union. As in, a labour monopoly. This might sound radical, but I think there is good reason for developers and tech workers to consider this.
There are strong network effects and nearly unlimited economies of scale in most tech markets. In these cases, given enough time, the end result will be a monopsonist employer.[0] This results in lower employment, lower wages and, ultimately, the replacement of labour with additional accumulated capital (e.g. ML algos) and/or cheaper substitute labour (e.g. imported foreign workers). Even in cases where there are a few large firms in competition (e.g. Google and Apple), they will have incentive to collude and make illegal agreements on hiring practices, wage ceilings etc (and there have been documented instances of this).[1][2]
The logical way for software developers to avoid exploitation is to form a labour monopoly (i.e. a union or a guild).
I've noticed some interesting features of the software development labour market: quite a lot of the work is creative in nature, you produce non-rivalrous products (i.e. my consumption of 'software x' does not block someone else's consumption), and the workforce is supposedly peppered with unusually talented individuals who produce 50-100x the value that the average worker does.
There are two other industries that have similar features: traditional screen entertainment (TV & Movie), and professional sports leagues. In both of these industries, the content producing workers (baseball players, actors) are invariably a member of an industry guild or union, and they operate more like independent contractors than employees.
Food for thought.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony#Welfare_implications
[1] https://www.cnet.com/au/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
> In these cases, given enough time, the end result will be a monopsonist employer.[0] This results in lower employment, lower wages and, ultimately, the replacement of labour with additional accumulated capital (e.g. ML algos) and/or cheaper substitute labour (e.g. imported foreign workers).
Unions that have closed-shop contracts with employers are, by definition, monopsonies on labor. Employees are required to be union members in order to be employed, and the union is the sole purchaser of the employee's labor (before reselling it to the employer).
Some of the earliest and most successful unions formed in industries in which there already was a single, monopsony employer for an unionized market (think: "company towns" in the Rust Belt). But that's a very different situation from taking a competitive market and turning it into a monopsony.
Sorry for the late reply. It's true that unions tend to have more success forming in monopsony employer situations, usually because of the labour force abuses that tend to follow. The other context where unions have high coverage (and tend to be unusually militant) are industries where the job carries a high degree of risk for the worker.
Historically this risk has almost always taken the form of physical danger (e.g. miners, steelworkers, construction workers etc.). Whether intellectual labourers will be motivated to organise by less proximate, but no less real, risks (e.g. the risk of being automated out of a job, being denied ownership of one's own IP/thoughts etc.) remains to be seen.
The other interesting factor is that there seem to be parts of the tech industry where a worker produces orders of magnitude more surplus value for their employer than they are paid for their efforts. I suspect this may have been a factor in the unionisation of screen entertainment workers and professional sports people (particularly when radio and TV turned those markets into 'winner-takes-all' markets).
And I'm not sure I'd personally characterise many of the markets in the tech industry as competitive. The most lucrative markets seem to be either dominated by a de facto monopolist (e.g. search, social networking) or duopolists (e.g. Windows vs OSX, GFX cards and CPUs, the android and iOS platforms etc.).
Yes, despite a lot of tech workers insistence of unique professional distinction, there is plenty of well worn ground for the exact kind of labor we provide being unionized.
What benefits would a strong Tech Workers' union to provide? And what percentage of one's income would be membership dues be?
Floors for wages, combatting H1-B abuse, fighting against toxic cultures driven by an untouchable management class.
In terms of dues, unions are democratic, so you can debate, decide, and vote on what you think is appropriate.
Return to 40 hour work weeks, eliminate unpaid oncall, paid overtime.
Susan Fowler should've had a union to complain to, instead of Uber's hostile HR department.
> Susan Fowler should've had a union to complain to, instead of Uber's hostile HR department.
As a minority, you can't assume that a union rep is on your side. Especially if the complaint is against someone else at your company who is represented by the same union, if that person is more politically important (within the union) than you are, you're risking a lot - up to and including retaliatory termination of union membership[0] by speaking out. It's your word against theirs, and you're not the one hiring your representative, so you can't be sure that their incentive is to advocate your case to the bitter end, instead of to brush things under the rug.
If you want someone who has no conflict of interest to advocate your case, you need a lawyer, not HR or a union representative. At best, the latter will refer you to a lawyer (at which point they're not doing anything for you you couldn't do yourself). At worst, they will cost you your job, and possibly your career[1].
[0] Which, incidentally, is not protected by the same laws that protect retaliatory termination by employers.
[1] If you're in an industry that's represented by one single union, having your membership terminated means you should probably start looking for other career options.
I think we can all agree existing unions need to be made more democratic. If your union rep isn't on your side, they should be replaceable.
> I think we can all agree existing unions need to be made more democratic. If your union rep isn't on your side, they should be replaceable.
The problem I'm talking relates to how people in the majority group can politically overpower those in the minority. "Making unions more democratic" doesn't fix that; democracy as a system is literally designed on the principle of the majority (or plurality), not the principle of the minority.
Just as an HR representative works for the company (not for you), a union representative serves the people who elected them as a group, not you individually. If you are a minority member, you can't assume that your representative has your best interests in mind. And, by definition, you don't have the political power to replace them.
Anything you like, basically.
Without a a union there's a power imbalance between employer and employee. People say it's all based on mutually agreed contracts. In reality, you are probably much more dependent on your job than the company is on you. That's because they may lose something like 1/1000 of their employees when they fire you, but you lose 100% of your jobs[1].
Unions are a way correct this balance. Employees band together, so that failure to reach an agreement is as painful for the employer as it is for the employee, i. e. (in the worst case) work stops and nobody gets paid.
[1]: If you doubt me, try getting Google to come in for 6 interviews and make your future manager do a whiteboard exam.
Sure, band together and fix the power balance on your own, but don't force me to join one.
I am perfectly OK with "fighting" the power imbalance on my own, using a skill called "negotiating my salary" and "voting with my feet".
Neither of those things are forbidden by unions. Actors are unionized and negotiate their salaries. And of course you're always free to quit.
> Neither of those things are forbidden by unions.
They can be - and most unions do prohibit negotiation with employers. SAG-AFTRA is the exception, not the rule, due mostly to the temporary, part-time, and gig-based nature of their work.
Sure - but we're talking about a new union for tech workers here. It can be what we want it to be. There's no reason to lock ourselves into some kind of historical determinancy. SAG-AFRTA never did.
> Sure - but we're talking about a new union for tech workers here. It can be what we want it to be. There's no reason to lock ourselves into some kind of historical determinancy. SAG-AFRTA never did.
There is, and that's the NLRA. It's a very rigid law, and there's a reason that basically all unions formed under the NLRA, regardless of the industry, have converged on the same sorts of membership agreements, employer contracts, and corporate policies.
You can start off with whatever you like, but pretty much any NLRA-regulated union will end up with the same result; it's not a coincidence.
Not to mention the fact that software developers will eventually find themselves in exceptionally weak bargaining positions, at least as individuals. Almost uniquely so.
It's great that remote working is possible in software dev, but the flipside is that it's much easier to outsource your job to another country. And working on cutting edge stuff like ML sounds interesting. But it also means you may one day find yourself building the surplus capital that will ultimately replace you. You refuse to do that? Cool, you're fired. Maybe the guy sitting in the cubicle next to you will.
[Dramatization. May not happen.]
Well not exactly, you get what other people like, which is generally not what I myself like.
I have to wonder if this isn't an attempt to co-opt the movement started by @TechSolidarity / Maciej.
I also think -- particularly if the HN audience is in any way representative -- that engineering in particular is far too deeply bought into the narrative of the rights of capital owners to unionize. Much like America, we think we're all temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
I'm well aware unions aren't perfect. But they are a countervailing center of power who work for employees. The relationship between the employeed and the employers is a fundamentally contentious relationship: sometimes your incentives align, but often they don't. See eg things like the option trap vs 10 year exercise periods, or even founders getting millions of cash off the table while employees get $0. Much like how VCs can whine all they want, founders get better deals because of economic forces such as decreased engineering costs from open source software and better tooling, more capital seeking investment, etc; employee unions are a way to better the outcome of the employees themselves.
> Much like America, we think we're all temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
The reason that old canard doesn't carry a lot of weight around SV and the other tech hubs is that a lot of rank-and file, non-manager techies actually _are_ millionaires.
"A lot" if you measure in absolute numbers. Very few if you measure in percentages. Remember, the median salary for a tech worker stagnated between 2000 and roughly 2012 or so, and even since then has only really risen because a few huge firms pay high salaries. Your average tech-worker still makes an upper-middle class salary that won't even buy a house in the Bay Area, Seattle, New York, or Boston.
Exactly.
All the rampant stupidity on here and elsewhere about how well tech employees are supposedly paid is simple to vanquish: divide by the median home price within a 30 minute commute of the office.
While the capital class makes billions off their backs, colludes with each other to restrict wages and labor mobility, and exploits H1-B subcontractors to do more of the same.
Why settle for this?
> While the capital class makes billions off their backs, colludes with each other to restrict wages and labor mobility, and exploits H1-B subcontractors to do more of the same.
You do realize that you're on a site run by Y Combinator, where a few people with an idea can transform into a multi-million dollar startup or even a multi-billion dollar business[0] for all to see? It should be rather self-evident why tired, old classist rhetoric doesn't get taken very seriously, particularly on a startup-oriented site like HN.
"Why settle for this?" I ask you in turn: why would anyone in SV settle for the stifling mediocrity and onerous rules of a union when millions are out there to be had for any with the courage and drive to try for it?
[0] "Including more than 400 active companies–Dropbox, Airbnb, Reddit, Stripe, Twitch, Homejoy and more–the market capitalization of Y Combinator startups exceeds $30 billion, according to the accelerator's president, Sam Altman." -- https://www.fastcompany.com/3033215/the-value-of-y-combinato...
>You do realize that you're on a site run by Y Combinator, where a few people with an idea can transform into a multi-million dollar startup or even a multi-billion dollar busineas
Of course. Why preach to the converted? And if you think "classists arguments" are outdated in an era of inequality unseen in the US since the 19th century, perhaps look more to history.
>why would anyone in SV settle for the stifling mediocrity and onerous rules of a union when millions are out there to be had for any with the courage and drive to try for it?
Because under the conditions of contemporary Capitalism, believing in venture capital as your ladder to the moon is as mythically fictitious as your description of unions.
Don't get me wrong - technology and its impact on society is as revolutionary as was industrialization. But it's also obvious that a similar class of robber barons is attempting to subvert this revolution into a new Gilded Age. In that era, the laboring classes, through their solidarity and protest, stopped their children and families from being worked to death, their land being poisoned, and generally having their futures stolen from them. What you have the privilege of calling "stifling mediocrity" is only because of their sacrifice.
> Because under the conditions of contemporary Capitalism, believing in venture capital as your ladder to the moon is as mythically fictitious as your description of unions.
We have before us, in the form of Y Combinator and other accelerators, many examples of successful businesses started using VC by ordinary people such as you and I. And, as a former resident of Detroit, I quite assure you that my portrayal of unions comes from observing their behavior over quite some time and I am far from alone in having first-hand experience with their, shall we say, drawbacks. So forgive me if I fail to see the "mythically ficticious" bits here.
I will agree that many modern worker protections do stem from the risks taken and sacrifices made by organized labor nearly a century ago and that we ought all to be grateful for that indeed. However, that was then, this is now. History is fine but what unions are in the United States today is something that many software professionals, including myself, don't wish to be a part of.
>We have before us, in the form of Y Combinator and other accelerators, many examples of successful businesses started using VC by ordinary people such as you and I.
Well no. We have many examples of successful businesses started using VC by people with family money to subsidize away the risk to their living expenses.
Right. Even at the top of the shit pile you're still standing in shit.
And Carmack is unlikely to ever join such a group, being as he is a staunch libertarian.
You'd be surprised how thin the line is between a libertarian and a mutualist.
It's interesting because it would need to have the teeth of a union yes, but unlike unions of the past that lobbied for better wages and working conditions, what is being proposed is a union to ensure their company does what the workers feel is morally right for the world (not necessarily their customers, but the greater community of people affected by each companies goals and purposes).
I understand that's the thrust of the post, but practically those things aren't really that much different if done effectively.
You make a good point though and if the intention is that it will result in some kind of engineering code of conduct or Hippocratic oath - then my guess is that it will have too many hurdles. The military code of conduct is immensely difficult to arbitrate and the Hippocratic oath isn't anything without governing boards for certification and licensure.
So there needs to be a power structure somewhere that holds the power of the members if it's going to be worthwhile and that would have to be linked to the other tangibles like pay and time.
It comes down to how and what is measured. Time and Pay are easy to measure, if your MongoDB is being implemented "morally" or not is much muddier.
What you're describing isn't a union. What you're describing in a professional association that helps protect workers who make ethical decisions that land somewhere awkward.
You don't get the power of a union without the self-interest that makes a union.
Well personally, I feel that what's morally right for the world is that tech workers should get better wages and working conditions, while standing in solidarity with the non-technical employees at tech companies to help them get the same.
>If this moves the needle on a union then great
I'm trying to figure out why a tech worker union would want to sidle up to, say, YC. As someone who spent a few years as part of the Canadian Autoworkers Union, management were adversaries, not partners. Are the bourgeoisie trying to get out in front of this thing?
> Are the bourgeoisie trying to get out in front of this thing?
Yes. This sounds like techno-Fordism. Given that Fordism was invented to stabilize and rejuvenate a crisis-ridden form of capitalism, this is a very good sign.
The union would also want to work with VCs, since they're the real managers in the industry. Startup companies come and go, but VCs and giant firms (Google, Apple, Microsoft) last.
I'm trying to figure out why a tech worker union would want to sidle up to, say, YC.
Well they shouldn't, actually - which was the whole point of my last sentence.
it's odd the tech community in sv wouldn't want a union. i mean the tech alone is already attracting top talent imagine what a decent union would do. people from all over would be like omg they work normal hours and have decent benefits and they get to work at these huge companies and they're protected by a union damn
but the execs are waiting for most of us to be replaced by the algos we're writing before that happens so who knows
We're not special. We're just like the other engineering disciplines.
No, this industry is far from being like the other engineering disciplines. It should be like them, but it is still far too immature to be put at that level.
For starters, we are not licensed. And I suspect that a non-citizen couldn't get an engineering license.
Licensing would require settling on actually understanding that software development is an engineering activity and not an extended CS 401/501 project. The industry isn't even mature enough to consider licensing either.
In Australia, non-citizens can get engineering licenses. The process is basically the same as a citizen (just more complicated because of visa requirements, as you would expect).
What? Of course non-citizens can get an engineering license. It can be trickier if your education is from outside the US, but citizenship is not an issue.
I stand corrected
Neither are other engineers (in the US).
There are certifications (e.g. PE) but you can get a job with or without them.
Not so. If you are not a licensed Professional Engineer, there are jobs you can't get. And that's what I mean by "licensed".
There are jobs you can't get, but there are also plenty of other engineering jobs that you can get.
Exactly. As opposed so say, an nurse, lawyer, or electrician.
If you don't have the right piece of paper, you can't be one of those.
Our starting salaries are much larger than other engineering disciplines, and I'd argue we don't make nearly as stable constructions as other engineers. In Australia the starting-out civil engineering salary is almost half the starting-out software engineering salary (and this is a country which hates technical innovation and prefers building more mines).
We shouldn't make as stable constructions as other engineers, for very good reasons: they're building things out of concrete, iron, and steel that are meant to last for years doing a very predictable job without alteration after their initial construction. If you don't get it 100% right before you close up a building, it's going to cost millions to go back and fix it.
As programmers, conversely, we build text files that are expected to change every day as the business needs shift, and we know up front that most of the code that we write will not survive as-is. Speed of iteration is far more important than getting things right the first time, and the cost of a delay in the name of building something right can be much higher than the cost of refactoring the simplest solution that can possibly work once you actually need to (YAGNI is not something you'll hear very often in physical engineering fields).
The other engineers do their part, and then software controls it. Bad software destroys things. People get killed by accident.
Then there are the security holes in things that will never get updates, the malware-infested webcams and TVs... this too impacts the world.
We can combine it all: connected cars. This isn't "other engineers". It's software developers -- call them programmers or software engineers if you like.
Sure. In the very rare situation of connected cars, or infrastructure, it is important that code quality is bullet proof.
Fortunately most developers write web and mobile apps.
It doesn't really matter that much if 1% of the time the add friend button doesn't work on the Opera web browser.
Who is the "we" he's speaking to here? I know that Twitter and HN, i.e. the generic internet, are the only places Sam and I typically might cross paths, so who is the community he's speaking for? Gavin de Becker and "forced teaming" comes to mind.
Is this YC trying to stay on top of the tech activism bubbling in various corners these days? He doesn't say, the entire post is expressed as self-evident, which makes me think his (et al) motivation is competitively strategic, and specifically political. Vagueness is construed against the writer, especially when it's intentional.
If he is indeed speaking to the DSA and ersatz-unionization ideas floating around, why not join forces with people who are already working on this? Fragmentation? Disruption? Narratology?
We’d also like to discuss how tech companies can heal the divide in our country
Evergreen take, but you still can't solve a people problem with technology.
>Who is the "we" he's speaking to here?
"Sam Altman, Debra Cleaver, Matt Krisiloff". They sign the post.
>I know that Twitter and HN, i.e. the generic internet, are the only places Sam and I typically might cross paths, so who is the community he's speaking for?
The tech community.
The tech community, or the portion of the tech community that is Silicon Valley Liberal?
(Bear in mind that even if you feel inclined to write off non-liberals, there is a such thing as a non-Silicon Valley liberal.)
I can't help but feel this organization is going to have a built in equivocation fallacy where whenever it is suitable they'll claim to be a "tech worker union" but whenever it comes time to decide what the union is actually going to do it'll be the "Silicon Valley Liberals" deciding what to do.
>The tech community, or the portion of the tech community that is Silicon Valley Liberal?
When they write "For good and bad, technology has become a central force in all our lives. As members of the community, ..."
they obviously mean the tech community.
And they ARE members of the tech community (regardless of if they are also members of a subset, like SV-liberal tech community or anything similar).
And if they were setting out to be a union in the conventional sense, that would be fine. But as a weird undefined vaguely amorphous "We're a union that's going to do political things", it matters whether the Silicon Valley liberals are going to be making all the decisions.
I said this on another thing that got lost on /new recently, but either form a PAC or form a union, but don't try to do both.
I very much expect this to be structurally non-viable. Once the union has to make positive decisions about what to push for even the apparent political unity in Silicon Valley will be revealed to be less strong than it seems when you're merely looking at the fact that "I don't know anyone who voted for Trump", let alone what happens if you try to extend it out of Silicon Valley. (And if this is supposed to be unionesque, you'll have to almost immediately as plenty of SV companies have major non-SV offices.) There are unions that were politically active, but they always combined it with a very strong message to their members that their primary task was watching out for their members. Starting right out of the gate with "Our first priority is political activism" means that you can pretty much guarantee the leadership will end up detached from the membership in a small number of years. Something may emerge from that process, but it won't be a group of people that has anything like a quorum of the "tech community"... it'll just be a PAC.
> The tech community.
The SF/SV tech community defined by high-growth startups, maybe. I don't think he is qualified to say a damned thing about the actual practicing developers.
There's already a solution for this - worker ownership of companies with corresponding democratic rights.
We've just emerged from an era where benevolent tech companies were supposed to stand up for us and reflect our values. Instead, they put on a polite face, said the right words to us, and then did whatever served their interests irrespective of our concerns. Repeating this scenario is foolish and only going to worsen the situation.
I like the fictional future on Mars in the Kim Stanley Robinson novels where there are no companies, but co-ops. Your time goes into the co-op and everyone owns a portion of that for life.
This is a greater dramatic shift and I'm not sure if we'll see it in our lifetimes, but it would be nice that, even that first high school job at a cinema would earn you shares in that company equal to the time you put in, for life. In some ways, that would make more sense than basic minimum income.
It will happen. The limiting factor is we need to get the friction for forking an existing co-op down close to zero. Unfortunately most people who work for a co-op still think of it as proprietary ("this is my co-op, and we don't have any openings right now. If you want yours you have to start your own").
Intellectual resistance from co-opers isn't the main bottleneck though. Management infrastructure needs to be all digital and open source, and forking needs to be technically easy. That means the accounting, staffing, and operations procedures all written out in code, rather than in QuickBooks on some computer in the stock room. On github, with one-touch deployment to Heroku, or some equivalent. Ethereum maybe.
Once we're there I think it will be fairly easy to sell the employees on the "you should spend some time training people who are forking your business" concept, since they are (mostly) already amenable to anarchist (you don't really own anything) values. At that point it will be viral and anyone who is providing ops and logistical support for that ecosystem will get very rich.
>> It will happen.
As someone who was born and raised in the Soviet Union and spent the last 20 years in the US, I hope to dear god this doesn't ever happen. I don't know where else I'd have to emigrate if it does. To Mars maybe?
What you're describing is essentially "collective enterprise" or "kolkhoz", where nominally you own a share in a venture, but in practice you don't own shit, and as a result you don't consider it "your own", and as a direct consequence of not actually owning property, you just can't bring yourself to care. This gives rise to a lot of unsavory and damaging behaviors: from not actually working all that hard, to outright stealing. They had a saying in the USSR: "Everything belongs to the kolkhoz, so everything belongs to me." So who's to judge you if you e.g. steal a couple of tons of kerosene to heat your hothouse in winter?
Communists had to _shoot people_ who had even a modicum of entrepreneurial skill ("kulaks"), and take away their property in order to get the rest to join after the October Revolution of 1917. I suspect that's how things looked to the revolutionaries back in late 19th century. They've never experienced their proposed ideology on their own hide and therefore did not see its rough edges and downsides. All of this collectivism in the US can exist only as a part of a broader staunchly capitalist economy, and then only during the "good times" when people's needs are more or less met and they can spare some energy on pursuing ideological purity.
All of this discussion about communist ideals from people who have never experienced anything anywhere close to what it's like is like a bad nightmare to any Eastern European who actually has a first hand experience living under a communist regime. Truly, those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
I, for one, will sacrifice everything I've got to prevent any even remotely communist development of events here in the US. Yes, that does include not considering Bernie "Money grows on trees" Sanders seriously. Communism does not work. It never did work. It never will work. I'm 100% certain of it.
Cue people explaining to me that the "USSR never actually had communism" and "you're holding it wrong". You're missing the point.
I model you a bit like my father, who grew up in a Soviet satelite state, if he had ended up in the US instead of a country with strong socialist history: he will argue for free education, basic income, national healthcare, nationalization of infrastructure and resources (all of which are pretty socialist ideas), but will immediately revert to referring to kolkhoz and aparatschiks if any politician or activist openly endorses socialist views.
The main point where I will agree with you is that USSR and FORCED anything is wrong. But what would be so wrong in expanding and evolving the cooperative model and letting workers owning their companies become the norm? To me it is all about making that the more efficient way to run a company, so people do it voluntarily. This could be accomplished by changing some of the laws regarding liability, taxation etc to reflect their intended purpose (or by going full way to corporate personhood and making something like a transnational impossible, i.e. if you want to do business in that country, you need to get a "corporate passport"). The current US system is broken. USSR was broken. Let's try to mix and match and add new things. Marx was probably right in his diagnosis of the fatal tendency of capital to consolidate and turn free market capitalism into crony capitalism. The efficient solution to this seems to be the german, scandinavian, canadian mixture of the two. Heck, even china on the more dystopian side "works" because they combine the two
You were flagged, but I don't see any rule violations so I vouched for you. I share many of your same fears. But your argument is a slippery slope argument, so I can't really argue against it. Maybe you're right, and the worker-owned Pizza co-op down the street from me will slide into Stalinist authoritarianism. We'll see. I think the fact that it is voluntary and you are at will to choose an ownership-based enterprise instead is a key difference from the Soviet Union.
I'll also point out that the vast majority of U.S. employees don't have ownership stakes and they still show up to work and work hard. Many people (retirees, the rich, other do-gooders) even work hard for organizations and don't get paid.
I appreciate your recounting of history though, and share your concern. The biggest fear I have is that decentralization of operations will make it easier for exploitation of workers on a small scale in secret. I also do share your fear that my understanding of how much resources will be needed is off because I grew up in a country where those resources were presumed.
But these fears are not enough to stop my work. Capitalism has led to my neighbors in the Bay Area being regularly shot, and that's a real problem I am dealing with today. So my concern over those shootings is greater than my concern about the theoretical future ones you are cautioning against.
You're wrong to assume that us naive Americans have no idea what it's like to see your friends and neighbors be shot for political reasons.
The point is that your pizza co-op can only exist as a non-dominant form of organization in a wealthy society. Once it becomes the dominant form, everything goes to hell. There isn't a single country in the history of this civilization where this wasn't proven true. Now, you could argue that we're not "cultured" enough to live onder such utopia, but my retort will be that you need to figure out a way to experiment with it at scale first without subjecting everyone to what you think (but, obviously, not _know_) is better. As they used to say back in the day in the Soviet Union "test it on dogs first". Even Lenin (patron saint of communist revolutionaries and a murderous dictator) ended up realizing he's wrong about collectivism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy
"Exploitation of workers" is actually the greatest thing about the West. Those workers wouldn't even be able to care for themselves if they weren't "exploited", and by creating the societal pressure to do so, through moderate poverty (very few people in the US know what real, actual poverty is), and general disapproval of leisurely lifestyle, you motivate people to be productive, which ultimately benfits society. Then, once they acquire a modicum of wealth and property, they get to "exploit" others by paying them a mutually agreed upon fee in order to have some work done.
I'm technically a "worker" who is quite happy to be "exploited" by my capitalist overlords, as long as I get paid a few hundred thousand dollars a year. Sure, they make millions, and I make much less but so what?
People here are arguing for more companies like REI or Mondragón, and you are talking about proletarian revolution in a situation completely different from the economic and social devastation caused by World War I. This is completely premature hysterics.
Workers co-ops predate the USSR, one of the oldest the Co-Operative Group was founded in 1844 and is still going. Whilst what you say sounds terrible it's also far from the only working model such organisation could follow.
Thank you for sharing that.
There's nothing that precludes people from creating employee owned companies now. Where I live there are several of them, and there's the possibility that the one I work at is going to transition to that.
If they don't exist in large numbers now, I'd have to think there's something about them that makes them struggle to be viable. Human nature most likely.
Every German company with more than 500 employees is required to have 1/3 of board members elected by the employees. Above 2000 employees it's 1/2. For these, and smaller companies as well, there are more requirements to allow participation in the decision-making process "on the ground".
It's hard to measure the effects, but it's generally thought to have at least lead to less-bitter labor conflicts, because there's constant communication between the parties.
>This is a greater dramatic shift and I'm not sure if we'll see it in our lifetimes
Many industries (and I don't mean natural food stores) have had cooperatives for decades. Agriculture is a big one, but industrial cooperativism is very real too. There are even already a few tech firms run as cooperatives.
The way to push the shift is to build a cooperative corporate structure which allows neatly for outside investment without compromising the interests of the worker-owners.
If the root cause of this problem is that
-companies violate privacy rights to gather more big data
-more data translates to more investment (I'm seeing this happen at my current company right now)
-VCs, who are the top of the food chain, are the ones pushing for higher returns (like any rational actor would do)
-then shouldn't the government step in and regulate this area?
Define standards that would limit the amount of funding/valuation based on 'user as product'?
The root of the problem is the authoritarian structure of modern enterprise. I know many good people who work at bad companies, who, were they given the chance to have their say, would change things wildly for the better.
You'd rather say that at-will employment and especially the tight labour market outside tech enables the authoritarian structure of the modern workplace.
No, I meant expressly what I said.
A democracy cannot function when it harbors inside itself a system in which the survival of most people is determined by something organized like a dictatorship. The poor conditions in the modern labor market have been engineered by these authoritarian systems in collusion with the governments they corrupt with their outsized wealth and power. It's intended to disenfranchise people politically and economically to ensure a small class of oligarchs maintains control of both systems.
At-will employment, tight labour markets, etc., are a significant part of that engineering.
I suspect you and HarryHirsch are in violent agreement.
Eh, I can totally imagine a cooperative that monetizes user data.
Of course the government should do something about it. But I'd bet most people would agree that killing or stealing are immoral, even in the absence of laws against it. In fact, every one here has, on innumerable occasions, not stolen something even though they could have been sure they wouldn't be caught.
Your game theory applies to people as well: if you find a wallet on the street, it doesn't make sense to give it back to the owner.
And yet, you'll find many people who do give it back. That's because we have evolved emotions such as altruism, or empathy. Those are still useful, even when most of morality has been formalised into criminal law, because societies tend to work better (and are more fun) if you can trust people, at least for the small stuff.
There's no reason we shouldn't expect corporations to follow a similar path,
True, some corporations might be altruistic, but probably not all. Murderers still exist in society, and for those we need laws to guide everyone. If all laws and police disappeared suddenly, I think it would take less than 5 years for societies to descend into complete chaos. Laws still seem necessary?
Absolutely – and in the case of corporations, I'd say there is still a lot to do to improve the law governing their behaviour. But since chances for that seem to be quite low currently, and because even a perfect legal system cannot always capture every eventuality, there should be certain behaviours that are generally frowned upon, just as there are for people.
One example I recently heard was from a woman who was fired after attending her husband's funeral. That probably happens less than a dozen times per year, and might just not warrant a law. It still shouldn't happen.
(The problem, of course, is that with people our sense of morality is largely guided by other peoples' reaction to our behaviour. Corporations will never have the same sense of shame, and the closest analogy – boycotts – rarely work)
Tech workers are as disparate and varied as non-tech workers...
There is a hierarchy and I think it is unlikely we will see common ground emerge. Survival of the fittest and the best will still win the day. Just like the labor unions of the industrial era, efforts like this are doomed to be spikes of ideology rife with the same contradictions of those it proposes to keep in check.
Some tech workers run multimillion dollar businesses and some push bits around for them in the wee hours of the morning for much less.
Some have PhDs in category theory and write Haskell on a multiple 6 figure salary in finance and some maintain dated ruby on rails systems they didn't write for much less.
Some roll around on scooters in data centers putting out real fires in environments that need high availability. Others spend their days upgrading old versions of windows in small town school districts.
The same divides that existed before the internet will follow us. Nothing new here. Work hard, strive to get to the top, and hang on. Unions are not the answer. Darwin always wins the day.
Exactly. This post is founded on so many bad assumptions..
We'd also like to discuss how tech companies can heal the divide in our country.
Why _shouldn't_ there be divides in our country? Which divide is being referred to? Religious? Political? Net worth? Productivity? Persuasion?
Why assume differences need "healed?" Why this constant, desperate push for homogeneity?
Why can't people simply be different, and have conflicting opinions and worldviews? Why can't these disagreements, alongside of passionate debate, be lauded and encouraged instead of shamed?
Why can't people simply not like one another sometimes, without needing "healed"?
A lot of the push for healing is really about a belief that the other side would agree with you if they just had all the facts. That what's holding back agreement is educational in nature.
I don't think this is true, to state it mildly, but a lot of modern politics (and nearly every smart-aleck tweet ever written) makes a lot more sense when viewed through this lens.
Why can't people simply not like one another sometimes, without needing "healed"?
If people could simply not like each other without killing each other or making each other's lives unbearable that would be one thing. Problem is people cant' seem to be able to manage that.
> Tech workers are as disparate and varied as non-tech workers...
Yes, he should visit the rust belt (where I grew up) some time - there are gasp actual programmers making decent money there!
And a whole lot of people who are just never, ever going to be able to learn how to code.
For once, I wish the upvote button would have a multiplier.
Tech workers have something so much better than that. Freedom. If you do not like the values of the current company find a new one or start one.
Mob rule knows no fairness. When your ideas are vague, people fill them up with their version of fairness. Employees who are just starting out do not know anything about making sacrifices to build something bigger than themselves. If they collectively form a gang and override the will of the founders and investors who made more sacrifices, it drains the spirit of the individual to risk their time and savings to start something new.
People are free to organize their efforts but it takes founders and their sacrifices to make things happen. This collective power should embrace ideas of fairness and voluntarism instead of laws and force to get their way.
You could make the same argument about most engineering disciplines. Yet other engineers have unions, because historically they've had unions and they've worked out well. The only reason that software engineering unions aren't common is because we didn't adopt them at the beginning.
Quick reminder that unions are the reason that many of the benefits you have in the workplace today are standardised across the workforce -- a union that has teeth can actually make a difference to your employer's actions.
That probably explains why "other engineering disciplines" do not have as many startups as software. If you do not like the current place and its values why do you hold others and its owners hostage to your ideals? Why not start a new one and attract better talent with your better values.
Tech companies are trying to do something better than what previous generations could do.
And maybe tech unions- call them guilds or free associations or hacker collectives if you can't stomach the term- can do labor relations better than what previous unions could do, as well.
Do most engineering disciplines have strong unions with large membership? It doesn't seem very common in EE.
Mechanical and civil do at the very least. I generally find the electical engineers are more like programmers than other engineers.
> it takes founders and their sacrifices to make things happen
I believe that in many cases, the very first employees are equally responsible for the success of a company. I think this is especially true for tech companies founded by non-engineers.
This is a pretty bizarre and direct ripoff of pinboard's Tech Solidarity, except run by The Man and they'll "select" who's allowed to attend. Classless and tone-deaf would be charitable interpretation.
On the contrary, it's entirely class-ful. The lesson from this post is that the moneyed class will not allow the rabble any leadership.
But hey, Friday flamebait I guess.
As someone who knows little about Tech Solidarity, other than what's shown on their site, it seems like they're a bit different. Sam's group is a little more pointed in the direction of promoting the broader tech community's values into a company, and Tech Solidarity seems to be more about connecting developers to their community and supporting that interaction.
Perhaps you can expound?
I've been talking about organizing labor in tech companies around an ethical agenda since December. For example: https://sfbay.techsolidarity.org/2017/01/05/meeting_notes.ht...
That said, I'm happy to hear YC preaching from the same Bible. I would encourage Sam to coordinate with the many groups already working to what is apparently a shared goal.
I didn't mean to understate or downplay what Tech Solidarity was (I am just learning about it now), so I hope you don't take offence to my my questioning.
I am sympathetic to your cause.
No offense taken at all! Tech Solidarity is about in-person meetings, so I get that it's not easy to get a sense of the agenda from the outside.
I have gotten the sense that Tech Solidarity has shifted a bit from "what can we as tech workers do directly to support the political change we want to see" to "how do we build for ourselves the society we want to see reflected in the world at large", which is closer to what Sam seems to be proposing here.
(I think this makes sense in a lot of ways, because there are already good people doing the former work, and usually when tech-focused groups try to help out we just get in the way.)
Is this Tech Solidarity? https://www.recode.net/2017/1/30/14436496/pinboard-tech-soli...
>“Tech workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your goddamned open-plan offices.”
This is the greatest thing I've read all week.
I see the phrase "tone-deaf" everywhere and still don't get what it means. Is it just another getting-along-with-other-people thing?
It's not "just" anything. It implies that the communication in question doesn't appear to be taking account of context or audience, as if it was a song sung by someone who was literally tone-deaf and didn't realise it (not availing of the feedback loop that keeps a voice in tune). It's not necessarily evidence of disrespect by the communicator, but it is applied when the message seems to be unintentionally inappropriate.
Ok, thanks. (I think I shouldn't have used the word "just.")
I can't articulate why exactly... but I have a very bad feeling about this.
> We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the polarization we've helped create.
I'm pretty sure this kind of thing is just going to make the polarization worse.
Because it means de-emphasizing individuals by merging them into a group with one unified set of values.
This necessarily means erasing the voices of people who hold minority positions in that group.
It has every potential to be another place where those with the most time to burn, the most anger, and the most refined ideological weaponry grab power over those with minority viewpoints or healthy self-doubt.
Unions are supposed to fight for the thing the workers definitely have in common - their direct economic interests. Lashing that union structure to entirely different political fights invites the above kinds of problems.
Oh yeah.
"We’d also like to discuss how tech companies can heal the divide in our country. [...] We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the polarization we've helped create."
Easy as could be: switch to the other side
"We believe that tech companies can create a better economic future for all Americans"
Probably step #1 is to hire Americans.
"by spreading high-paying technology jobs around the country and other measures. [...] We are planning to hold a meeting on the evening of April 9th in the Bay Area."
Oops. To fix, move the meeting to one of the following: Wyoming, Oklahoma, northern Texas excluding Dallas, Alabama excluding Huntsville, Georgia excluding Atlanta, West Virginia, Tennessee, Montana...
> We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the polarization we've helped create.
I guarantee this is code for "we think Trump wouldn't have been elected if he couldn't use Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. Let's figure out how to make that possible."
I don't think you have the authority to offer such a guarantee.
'Having purged half the population, we've measured a marked downturn in polarization in Q3 of this year.'
Give us creative freedom and ownership of our IP.
When you claim all of our thoughts on and off the clock, you encourage us to avoid creatively-fulfilling ventures, burn out, and leave for greener pastures.
> Give us creative freedom and ownership of our IP.
you can't be serious. why would a company even exist if all the work it paid for would be owned by someone else?
i mean sure, you can live in that world, it's just nobody would pay for anything to happen.
Obviously an employer should own the work that their employees do for them as part of their job description. But we really need to stop accepting employment contracts that claim ownership of any unrelated works that you produce.
If I'm a web programmer, don't give me a contract that claims my paintings, music, consumer electronics designs, video games, etc, and then claim that it is unalterable "boilerplate." I don't care that you're a big company which has its fingers in many areas of business. That shit won't fly.
The company exists to sell a product or provide a service, not to own intellectual property. Sometimes the most effective means is to own the IP, but it's a means, not an end. Very few companies tend to market IP directly.
For instance, in a sufficiently broad view, 99% of AWS is other people's IP - the PC platform, hardware virtualization, Xen, Linux and userspace tools, Perl, etc. etc. And they seem to be doing a fine job commercializing it. They could build their own computing architecture, write their own hypervisor, design their own OS, etc., but that would probably be a less profitable approach. There's an existence proof in Microsoft's Azure and IBM's z/whatever-they're-calling-it-these-days, which are significantly less popular.
You pay for your business to continue operating, not for a lucrative exit strategy.
yeah sure. the open source services business model has some legs but they aren't that long.
in other words, yes it works, but not that great.
>you can't be serious. why would a company even exist if all the work it paid for would be owned by someone else?
Because software is, by default, a non-rivalrous good, and so a cooperative, share-and-share-alike mode of production makes more sense for it. Companies already deliberately support open-source contributions for exactly this reason.
A business's returns are based on products, customers, relationships. Specific proprietary knowledge may be a part of that, but it's quite often a very small piece. The more so for companies which open source core (or all) infrastructure.
Not releasing core tools can itself be a major impediment. Several years ago, a Google architect, Yonatan Zunger, noted half-in-irony that he'd settled on a hiring decision heuristic: "No".
That is: the answer to whether or not to hire anyone, was to not hire them. Again, somewhat in jest.
But also partially serious: Google has highly complex systems, operates very much on an NIH mindset, and has significant risks for any level of failure (though they've also engineered some impressive systems against many of those causes of failure).
I thought, and wrote, at the time that this was actually a major concern for me over the future viability of the company. If Google literally cannot find qualified talent, or figure out how to make the talent it does find qualified, then it cannot continue. Even accepting the hah-hah-only-serious nature of the comment, it's troubling.
Much of this problem can be avoided by opening up more of your core infrastructure, as it allows potential talent to both gain experience with your tools, and to demonstrate that experience, most particularly to you, which would then be of interest in an employment context.
Some additional context comes by way of a YouTube engineer I'd spoken with some years before that, who was commenting (this in the mid-2000s) how Google's technology was really old. That is, Google had settled on a software stack in the mid-to-late 1990s, and has (or had) to a large extent sealed itself off from the world since. As a consequence, Google's tools were diverging (in Google's interests) from those of the rest of the world.
(I don't know how that situation's played out since, though the comment sticks with me.)
Back to the question of IP: claiming rights to both what it is you teach your workforce, and what they come up with on their own (as I've seen written into employment contracts) ... betrays a staggering level of short-termism to my mind. It works out for the current King of the Hill, for so long as they're KotH, but tends to end rather poorly. Not only for those companies, but their customers, who are ultimately saddled with old, stale, one-off software for which the potential employment pools are small and generally less than stellar.
(Look up the recent HN discussion of the MUMPS programming language and the firm which continues to utilise it, largely in medical software, based out of Minneapolis. Cautionary tale. And yes, I'd heard of MUMPS decades before, and run then.)
It's good that Altman recognizes that something needs to be done here. Something does need to happen.
However: Altman is a business owner and an executive. I don't think he can coordinate the solution. The kernel of the issue here is the disengagement rank-and-file employees have from the public policy implications of their work. Employees don't need permission from owners and managers to be accountable for those implications. The widespread, implicit belief among the rank-and-file that they do need permission is the first obstacle that we need to address.
Rather than staging meetings and attempting to help shape the outcome, Altman and other executives should encourage their employees to work amongst themselves. Getting directly involved, however, is problematic, and I think owners and executives should probably avoid doing that.
I'd suggest that, if your net worth exceeds a million dollars and your entire income/value is derived from the current startup trends embodied by YC, you are uniquely unqualified to start talking about helping workers.
sama is a leader in the class of the exploiters, and crowdwashing like this won't change anything.
EDIT: The "general you", not "you, tptacek". :)
From the earlier sama post, What I Heard From Trump Supporters:
> Almost everyone I asked was willing to talk to me, but almost none of them wanted me to use their names—even people from very red states were worried about getting “targeted by those people in Silicon Valley if they knew I voted for him”. One person in Silicon Valley even asked me to sign a confidentiality agreement before she would talk to me, as she worried she’d lose her job if people at her company knew she was a strong Trump supporter.
..
> We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the polarization we've helped create.
Are tech employees the correct population to attempt to bridge a political divide? I'm not convinced that's the case.
And how do they propose reducing polarization of strongly held beliefs? Forcing one side, or the other, or both.. to abandon those beliefs? Forced non-diversity of thought?
Silicon Valley (especially SF) is all for diversity...as long as you think exactly like they do.
Wrong. There's little tolerance for bigotry. There's nothing wrong with that. Having the opinion that a class of people do not deserve the same rights as others is not "diversity" or "having a different opinion". It's bigotry, plain and simple.
What you want is for no one to call you out for espousing terrible views. You want freedom from consequences of speech, not freedom of speech.
And you're attacking someone simply for stating that they think "Silicon Valley (especially SF) is all for diversity...as long as you think exactly like they do." From left field, you're bringing up and arguing against "having the opinion that a class of people do not deserve the same rights as others". And declaring that you know what EduardoBautista "wants": "no one to call you out for espousing terrible views. You want freedom from consequences of speech, not freedom from speech." How you come to these conclusions based on that one statement, and then bring up your contrived ideas in a seemingly vitriolic attack against another person, I don't know.
Perhaps people wouldn't call what you're exhibiting "bigotry", but I would: based on a single statement, you jump to conclusions and attack someone based on those conclusions. I think such behavior is one of the biggest problems in (a part of) American culture, and I would wager I'm not alone in thinking this.
> How you come to these conclusions based on that one statement
Because that one statement is from Stormfront.
Simply for the sake of meaningful discourse, I'd like to believe there's more to this thought. But you offer little.
1. Is there proof you have of this? Or is your statement just one of "This is something I think /they/ would say."?
2. More importantly: If a statement comes from the mouth of someone you feel is unsavory, does that make the statement invalid? Is everyone who then utters that statement unsavory, and so on? Do you think you can come to that conclusion? Particularly with EduardoBautista's thought: do you think you could come to that conclusion?
Attempting to associate EduardoBautista with Stormfront (with a comment like yours) would be considered a damning accusation to many, though such tactics have become painfully commonplace. That is not what you intend, is it?
I'm saying that the sentiment expressed (vacuous complaints about "wrongthink" when the "wrongthink" in question is complaints about people choosing not to associate with fascists) originates from Stormfront and their ideological brothers-in-arms. Whether he's an actual white supremacist or someone who got suckered into repeating their propaganda is immaterial.
Definitely not alone, thanks for writing that.
No, it's not wrong. Which part of his comment is the bigotry you feel like projecting? Is approval for stronger border protection bigotry? Is thinking the EO on immigration is fine bigotry? Is making assumptions about every single political opinion someone has based on a single statement bigotry?
Do you think that liberals or tech employees are somehow above bigotry and treating people poorly? Remember Talia Jane and her letter, and the extreme criticism she faced from HN members? Do you think the attitude you commented with will help bridge a political divide? Because your words are exactly why I think it's laughable to expect tech employees to do anything about polarization other than make it much worse.
> espousing terrible views
Except your typical Trump supporter avatar is being distilled into a handful of beliefs, even though many may have other reasons for supporting.
Most of America seems to have forgotten that single issue voters exist on both sides.
At the same time, in order to support Trump, you have to feel that xenophobia, sexual assault, bigotry, and mocking of the disabled are perfectly acceptable in a world leader. So they're not entirely innocent.
In practice "little tolerance for bigotry" means you might get fired for supporting a viewpoint held by the majority of Californians.
"Tech companies are very receptive to their employees' influence. We believe that employees should come together and clearly define the values and policies they'd like to see their companies uphold."
Maybe he should replace "employee" with "investor" and start working on that? In the end it's the investors that force companies to make money at any cost.
Engineers like money too. And demand it from their employers.
If you are not doing that, you should.
Yes. I don't understand the people who say "I'd rather work in a company with a good working environment" as if you have to work for peanuts to have a good job. If you are convinced to work for a low salary in the name of "culture" your employer is laughing all the way to the bank.
I don't know... most of those places that pay a low salary in the name of 'culture' are startups, and most of those don't ever make any money... so there isn't really anyone laughing all the way to the bank.
Replace "culture" with some other buzzword or phrase, e.g. "work on hard problems," "intellectually challenging/stimulating," "positive work/life balance," "work on important problems," "be disruptive," etc.
This sort of "anything but financial compensation" compensation is ubiquitous in this industry.
And you're laughing all the way to having an excellent life.
Like, this is the market behaving appropriately. If companies can get better talent at better prices by providing better working environments, well, we're effectively buying nicer work environments. Whether it's worth the cost or not is a separate issue, and really depends on the price. Personally, I've priced working in SF instead of Mountain View at roughly $20k/year when evaluating job offers.
You don't seem to understand what I am saying. You are making the argument that you either have an excellent life or make 20k more. I am saying that you can find both.
Sure. But in the end it's the investors a company is listing to, not the employees.
> We believe that tech companies can create a better economic future for all Americans by spreading high-paying technology jobs around the country ...
From what I can tell, this doesn't really line up with the location and remote-friendliness of YC companies. Most seem to be in the Bay Area and few that I can tell allow remote engineers, managers, or execs.
Sorry, but being an Instacart delivery person in Dallas isn't a high-paying technology job.
Prove me wrong with real numbers please.
I have no clue what he's talking about, and what it sounds like he's saying makes me a little angry.
- Unions are a force to protect the 99% from the corruption of the 1%. They are not a force to drive a liberal agenda, though by protecting the little guy they may indirectly align.
- Increasing competition by getting more people into coding (be them from outside the country or from outside of cities) is the exact opposite of what a union would do. It would drive down wages for the skilled workers that investors are getting rich off of.
- Technology making peoples lives worse is the fault of a combination of capitalism and the fact that CEOs and investors are more motivated by adding 0s to their bank account than anything as nebulous as "good." Why should tech workers risk their jobs to force the hand of the companies they work at?
- Is he talking about automation taking jobs? Because the profit from the concentration of wealth again is at the hands of the 1% and .1%. Unless he's saying tech workers need to pass the buffet rule, or tech workers need to refuse to work at companies that don't give enough equity then I don't see how the average tech worker is the solution to the wealth being drawn away from the average citizen (who can't afford $500 in an emergency) into an investor's portfolio....
The same forces that have killed unions in the US will kill this. As long as labor can be shipped to areas of the world with a lower quality of life, they will do so. Lower level tech positions like tech support have already been shipped overseas, and once countries like India and China develop the infrastructure to take higher level tech jobs, they will go there too.
If we want to protect our workers, our labor laws, and our standard of living, we have to stop globalization.
1. "Overseas" is a curious definition. Linux was written in Finland, after all. Would blocking US workers from aiding Finnish technology have been productive?
2. Can it be stopped? If US companies refuse to work with Indian or Chinese employees, what is preventing India or China from out-competing the US company in the international market? If the US places tariffs on technology products and services from other countries, what is preventing those other countries from outpacing our standard of living?
1. It depends on where the work is shipped. Global trade between countries with similar minimum wages and labor laws is a net positive because it takes advantage of the varying resources of other countries without exploiting labor. Yet when a country has a vastly different economy, it can be not fair at all. For example, minimum wage in Mexico is $0.48/hr, and their quality of life is very low. How is it fair to the world when a richer country facilitates the poorer country's poor labor laws by shipping all its work to the poor country, all while gutting the richer country's middle class? It just leads to a race to the bottom to see which country can offer the cheapest labor.
2. It can be stopped. The US was an economic powerhouse before globalization, and had an incredibly powerful middle class with a high quality of life. What China has done is use the money from outsourcing into creating its own internal industries, which is why their economy is rising all across the board, while in the US we've been outsourcing our industries to the point where only the capital owners who exploit globalization are seeing an increase in quality of life. If we stop that, the globalists will suffer but our middle class will rise. As far as competition goes, what does it matter if we have the "strongest market" or whatever if the majority of people don't benefit from it?
Reminder: TechSolidarity, a very similar initiative is open to everyone and is meeting next Wednesday in SF https://techsolidarity.org/events/sf_april_5.html
In what way is it similar? I thought TechSolidarity was explicitly an anti-Trump thing. Didn't exactly get that vibe from this post.
And we have donuts!
See also https://techsolidarity.org/
This:
As members of the community, we're interested in ways in which tech companies can use their collective power to protect privacy, rule of law, freedom of expression, and other fundamental American rights
We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the polarization we've helped create.
At least the words are compatible, though the intent is probably not. Red America is perfectly happy to "protect privacy, rule of law, freedom of expression, and other fundamental American rights", and would love to "reduce the polarization".
Let's start with the easy one, polarization: that gets reduced if the tech industry accepts Red America values. Well? It works. It is a solution to polarization. Problem solved.
Red America is fond of privacy. FYI, the recent ISP thing isn't going over well with non-politicians. When gun registrations were published in a newspaper, that didn't go over too well. Opposition to stuff like home/family/schooling inspections (kid-related government agencies) is intense in Red America.
Red America loves the rule of law. You can tell that Trump has disappointed them on this when they chant "LOCK HER UP" and he evades the issue. Red America prefers that the constitution be interpreted very literally, using the actual text, with the meanings of words as they were in the English language at the time they were written.
Red America accepts freedom of expression even when they don't like it very much. It wasn't Red America that violently shut down Milo's speech. That was all blue.
Red America is obviously fond of other fundamental American rights. When the ACLU counts to ten, they do this: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (skipping the amendment they don't like)
Your idea of "compromise" is to demand capitulation. There is no reason for anyone to comply with your demands because you bring nothing to the table.
In the end, it was conservatives who shot Milo down by exposing his advocacy of Catholic priest molestation. His remaining supporters are fascist and reactionary pedophiles.
People from geographic Red America are welcome as long as they aren't bigots, fascists, or pedophiles.
One value I'd like to see enforced is better separation of employees' work and private life. Examples would include:
Not having to support politics I disagree with during or outside of work hours.
Not having my photo and about me on the company webpage. No one wants to know the truth that my hobbies are not rock climbing and playing the guitar.
Not being forced to go to conferences, hackathons, and other company sponsored events.
It would be nice if these values included lobbying for tech workers to not be exempt from overtime pay and reforms of the h1b visa program.
These recent interviews with Alan Kay [1][2] cover this topic from a perspective I find valuable. In addition, there are many other relevant presentations he has made and in which he presents his own perspectives and points to the ideas of others like Douglas Englebart, Neil Postman, Seymor Papert, Marshall McLuhan, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Paine [3]
[1] Alan Kay - Inventing the Future Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVUGkuUj28o
[2] Alan Kay - Inventing the Future Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6ZHxUwqPVw
[3] Alan Kay's Reading List http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp
Lots of focus in the comments here, on the Unions aspect of this post, but Sam leads with how it's "tech companies" who have the power and responsibility to change things. And then follows up saying that unions might be a good way to make companies beholden to popular belief.
This is mostly bullshit. Instead of putting the honus on the executives and VC's who define the growth-first business models, it's somehow the responsibility of their employees to wield the power of a tech company responsibly? To shape the direction of a company?
Maybe in a round-about way, Sam is saying that unions are the only way to responsibly limit the power of tech companies' leadership. But make no mistake, the responsibility for the power of technology falls directly in the laps of a company's leaders.
> We also believe tech companies have an opportunity and an obligation to reduce the polarization we've helped create.
Liquidate Twitter?
"We’d also like to discuss how tech companies can heal the divide in our country. We believe that tech companies can create a better economic future for all Americans by spreading high-paying technology jobs around the country and other measures."
Isn't the elephant in the room extreme capitalism? Tech is just accelerating it.
Perhaps the alternative is workers managing their own workplaces:
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure-Capitalism/dp/...
Every time the idea of a tech workers' union is brought up, the same tired criticisms of organized labor are brought up again and again.
Do people forget that this industry is built upon the ideal of innovation? Why can't we build a new type of union that fixes the bugs that prior unions suffered? Why can't we experiment and find new solutions? Why can't we disrupt the relationship between capital and labor?
The notion that unions are somehow inherently unworkable flies in the face of everything that the tech industry stands for.
It'd be appreciated if YC would record and or livestream the meeting mentioned near the end of the blog post for those who can't be in the Bay Area.
This, please.
A Tech Union is a great idea, starting with Bay Area employees banding together for higher equity at startups. If VC-funded startups suddenly couldn't hire their first employees for 1% equity (against the founders' 50-70%) then we'd see fairer payouts for successful startups.
We believe that tech companies can create a better economic future for all Americans by spreading high-paying technology jobs around the country and other measures
I believe this is key. Technology does not have to be binded to one or a few locations. If tech could once again try to be spread across other cities and states that will be good for everyone. It will be good for remote work, cost of living, people will support tech growth more nationwide, there will be new ideas that might not emerge in a tech hotspot and not everyone will have to move to one place which is really a single point of failure.
> We believe that tech companies can create a better economic future for all Americans by spreading high-paying technology jobs around the country and other measure
While an obvious positive, this completely ignores the fact that these higher salaries are precisely because we write software that increases efficiency over what a handful of humans can do. So while there is an increase in high paying jobs, there is inevitably a decrease in many more low paying jobs (short-term at least, likely long-term unless we learn how to re-train people better)
A few weeks back, I wrote a piece about assessing and setting your values as an engineer:
https://www.nemil.com/musings/software-engineers-and-ethics....
I was surprised we didn't discuss this more and I wanted to help someone early in their career think through it.
(I also got some good feedback from YC's Paul Buchheit who helped coin "Don't be evil" in the early days of Google)
I both like the idea of unions on the one hand (have greater group self-determination) but on the other hand it can lead to ossification and ultimately our own demise (through complacency, irrelevancy, protectionism, etc.)
I do like the idea of spreading the wealth to other parts of the country, especially those that are hit hardest by the changing characteristics of the economy --people we often forget, hollowed out industrial cities, forgotten rural areas, etc.
I would love participate in this event and I believe this effort may be an important step in moving us towards ethical software. Unfortunately, despite having a fairly unique and well-suited pedigree to contribute, I live a good thousand miles away.
Would there be an opportunity for individuals not located in the Bay Area to attend, provide commentary on meeting notes, or somehow participate without being present locally?
What are your guys thoughts on moving or starting a new tech community in a remote city that are not too expensive, such as Alaska even?
There used to be tech in interior California which is an inexpensive area. Sierra Online/Sierra Entertainment was a notable example. The Grass Valley Group was another.
Paul Graham's "How To a Silicon Valley" [0] has the best recommendations I've seen.
@pg's guide is good, but misses a few points.
There's the role of the defense industry and Silicon Valley. See Steve Blank's "Secret History of Silicon Valley":
https://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-va...
That said, there's a bunch of strength to @pg's points and conclusions. Portland and Boulder as potential tech hubs sounds about right. It might be possible to build out elsewhere -- Rochester and Buffalo in New York were technology centers, once, and though it's small, Burlington, VT, has much of the right vibe (though possibly too harsh winters) for tech.
I don't see the sweat-and-mildew belt -- the midwest -- really doing much. There's too much about getting outside and actually clearing your head, which the vast expanses of overhumidified prarie (or frozen tundra) don't offer. Though the land is cheap, and a few college towns (University of Illinois, University of Iowa, Notre Dame) might manage to create some centres around.
I'm also not entirely sure Chicago ought be written off, though I suspect it would take a tremendous amount to turn it around. On the one hand, it's lower-cost land, nearer East Coast centres, with good natural transport (air, rail, ship, truck) for various industry. On the other hand, the weather's little different from Ithaca or Pittsburgh, and the politics are interminable.
The flexability of pretty much doing what you wanted in California in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s is hard to beat, and that's continued to pay off. Though I'd argue those benefits are now largely gone.
The role of a cheap housing stock and/or the ability to pick up and create a long-term plan with a large set of land, say, in Chicago or Detroit, seems interesting though.
Alaska is a very expensive place; you have to ship everything in.
On a positive, though, hipsters have low tarrifs and pack flat.
"Rule of law" as a tech worker's value? Uber... Air BnB... ... illegal immigration.... does not compute.
The irony given YC's involvement in those is ... interesting, to say the least.
Should this have some sort of warning attached? I'm not sure every company will like having their (unauthorized) employees defining their policies and values. A common controversy with unions, especially when they're forming, is employer discrimination against participants.
The employees already instantiate a company's actual values. They just don't get to decide what the company says its values are.
It's pretty much the nature of tech hiring to select the most elite candidates from around the world. Distributing the offices through Rust Belt exurbs does not mean tech jobs for laid-off steelworkers in Rust Belt exurbs.
While it may not mean jobs for laid off rust belt workers if there were a number of tech workers living in the rust belt they would spend most of their salary in the rust belt which could very well lead to jobs in other sectors in the region.
One way to start "spreading high-paying technology jobs around the country" would be to advocate for distributing H1-B jobs via auction, rather than lottery. Perhaps the union could work on this!
That creates several modes of imbalance / abuse, potentially.
E.g., a large and cash-rich firm could bid on more visas than it needs, starving other firms.
It also fails to address the leverage that the visa sponsor has over the visa holder -- lose your job, and you lose your right to remain in-country.
Perhaps there could be penalties for non-use. But in general, the total market is so much larger than any given firm and its competitors that it shouldn't be an issue.
Out of the whole agenda, privacy is the only item for which it matters at all that we're in tech. Everything else seems to be things he hopes wealthy people in any booming industry care about.
The great thing about "values" is that everyone can have their own (play on same phrase with "standards")
To have "rights", they must be encoded in the legal code.
This is an interesting initiative, I look forward to seeing where it goes. Kudos to Sam, Debra & Matt for taking a lead on this.
"What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour.
"It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.
"We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen; who sometimes too, without any provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of their labour. Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of provisions; sometimes the great profit which their masters make by their work. But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. The masters upon these occasions are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen, accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which, partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate, partly from the necessity superior steadiness of the masters, partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of submitting for the sake of present subsistence, generally end in nothing, but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders."
-- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776. Book I, Chapter VIII, "On the Wages of Labour".
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...
Sorry for digressing from the main intent of the post, but I find it a little odd when in 2017, someone uses the term "worker" to describe me. I try to be definitely more than just that to my team and my organization. Maybe I'm oversensitive, but it just feels weird.