The Burnout Machine

> You never hear "Oh we should give everyone a raise, that's just good business"

Lots of big tech companies give people raises automatically when they think they're too underpaid.

> Frankly, maybe if companies need to make such "good business" tradeoffs frequently, it shows that the people running them aren't actually good at business in the first place

I really, really don't get this. Sometimes companies overhire. Sometimes it's even their own fault that they've overhired.

Either way, clearly IT HAPPENS and sometimes companies will need to lay off workers when it becomes clear they're not useful enough to justify their pay.

It's not inherently a reflection on the workers or the company; most of the time it's a reflection of interest rates and nothing more.

>good business is evil

Yes (often)

Why do you think that Sweden has almost no start up scene?

According to this crunchbase data [1] it has a lot per capita.

[1] https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/countries-most-startup-...

> It’s only adversarial because you want to get as much pay as possible out of them for as little productivity as possible.

And the employer wants to pay the employee as little as possible for as much productivity as possible.

In a perfect world with perfect information and rational actors on a level playing field, this is great: we expect supply and demand to converge, this is econ 101.

But it's not a perfect playing field, one side is coercive, holds most/all the cards, calls all the shots, treats people with lives and experiences as "resources", and seeks profit over all other objective functions. This is class dynamics 101.

> It’s only adversarial because you want to get as much pay as possible out of them for as little productivity as possible.

Or maybe pay that’s proportional to the value we provide

Yes but they do that without doing any of the labour.

Turns out when your work is thinking, you end up thinking a lot about the alienation of your labor's fruits.

Burnout isn't about pace of work or ability to take vacations. Burnout is about a disconnect between effort, meaning, and rewards.

> My worry with tech unionization is that generally it slows productivity increases and change.

Do you have examples?

> Now they're just saddled with too much bureaucracy and politics, and that's already led most of them to underperform, at least on an innovation basis.

Who?

And yet you still turn a profit at the end of the day, i.e., money that's not going to 'overhead'. Let's not kid ourselves. Your interest as the owner is to maximize that profit and minimize expenses, and our interest as workers is to maximize our wage and minimize your profit.

Can you estimate the actual overhead rate? Maybe 100%-200%?

> Start your own company

Okay, that seems easy enough and affordable with most tech salaries.

> hire the developers for $200,000

And you've just applied an unspoken filter. What founder can afford paying someone $200k a year, let alone multiple people? So that means you need to either be filthy rich already or to get investors - who will likely have very strong opinions about whether you should be paying devs double their market rate even if you still make a profit.

Not to mention that this assumes "your own company" can earn $1,000,000 for every developer it employs. Because "your own company" likely has a completely different value proposition, different customers and different tech.

The profit (read: surplus value not paid out to employees) of a company doesn't directly translate to market success or competiveness, but it can affect factors that do (e.g. availability of investments, bank loans, etc). It's not necessary to exploit your workers to operate a sustainable business, it's just very difficult to compete with companies that do because they can tap into those profits to cut you off (e.g. by cutting prices below cost) or leapfrog you (e.g. by acquisitions or hiring more people).

The existence of a company willing to pay its employees 2x the market rate doesn't impact the ability of other companies to hire enough sufficiently talented people at or below market rate to squash that company if it is small enough. "We live in a society" - or in a market in this case. The market wasn't created yesterday so if you join it today, you're starting at a disadvantage, not an equal level playing field.

Funny how competition and a free market makes it all possible

Tech CEOs will do anything to reach FAANG market caps and revenue except pay FAANG-level salaries.

It is funny when middle class salaried employees notice the same thing that every minimum wage worker knows intuitively, but that’s part of how this system remains stable is a lack of awareness.

This is how the monetary system works. While your math is inaccurate in terms of the spirit of what it is attempting to show, correcting for that, its still the way of the world until money is no longer a thing.

Incredible idealism. If you work in infrastructure, even development, there's no such thing as shutting down at the end of the day or weekends. 'You never know' if someone senior gets agitated off hours because something is broken, and is expecting a big group on a zoom call

> something that I suspect is the real reason unions don't catch on more in tech.

I think a bigger issue is the difficulty of measuring correctness and quantity of individual output.

For a classic-style of union in manufacturing, the standardized widgets coming off an assembly line mean it's easier to determine which workers are being fired for actual-cause, versus the ones who need to be protected by the union because it's a kind of employer retaliation or stealth-downsizing.

> It can be "web developers union" or similar - this is how the trades organize (see the pipefitters, and IBEW for some examples).

This is also how unions exist in most of the rest of the world as well. We take it for granted how weird the US labor recognition process is.

Most other countries following a long history of craft unionism. But in the US the laws were crystalized during a time of active conflict between traditional craft unions and socialist-inspired "industrial" unions. So all of the principles of the NLRB are this weird set of dated compromises.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_federation_competition_i...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craft_unionism

I quite like the idea of a trade union or accreditation board for SWE. The idea that we all work by a shared set of standards and terminology is appealing.

> make workers less disposable without substantially affecting growth (see: European tech hubs).

Sorry, but you shot your argument in the foot with this example. The last two months of Europeans trying with great difficulty to replace US tech with local tech have shown just how little tech has grown in Europe relative to the US. Is that because of their labor laws? Unclear. But it's certainly not a shining example of success.

You say this like it's some kind of zinger, but software engineers that actually negotiate their salaries generally earn more than those who don't.

With 25 years experience, the other thing is environments vary a lot, even within a single company. Things can be dysfunctional for lots of reasons, sometimes due to individual incompetence at various points in the hierarchy, or just systemic/cultural issues that no one has the vision or influence to identify and fix. When you're young and inexperienced, but technically brilliant, it's easy to miss the forest for the trees of what's really going on on the human side of things of any large group effort.

One of the things I value the most about working at startups in my early career is that it allows relatively "junior" folks more exposure to the big picture, and thus stay grounded in reality and not swayed by all the random narratives that are floated around in the corporate world. No matter how smart you are, or how honest and well intentioned the intent of the speaker, it takes experience to be able to parse through these and understand when and how they are relevant to your individual work. I see a lot of folks over the last 15 years who got hired into big tech during boom times, never got anywhere near the critical path of the business, and were exposed to all manner dysfunction by ambitious but incompetent social climbers who swelled the ranks of anything with the whiff of success. In these types of environment, people who just want to do good software engineering work can easily get swept into various dead end buckets of learned helpless, rest-and-vest, burnout, etc.

This is an interesting take, but I have a slightly different take. My ding dong company pays everyone including myself, salaries that are way too high. They gave ne a 30% raise I didn't even ask for or expect. We get a contract to do X, which say should take a team of 5 folks. However, we can only staff the contract with 3 folks because our salaries are too high. Now, we're all working 80hr weeks and stressed to the max because we really need more fresh minds on the challenge.

Now, we're in a contract lull, so some of us are only charging part time (75%), while actually working overtime.

It's bananas.

The solution seems obvious. Decrease salaries and increase company stock offerings. Then, if you and your colleagues care to work harder and deliver outstanding product, your stock value will rise over time and you'll be a.) more wealthy than taking 'dumb' money, and b.) more physically and mentally healthy.

> In my experience as a software engineer rounding out 6 years now, what I have observed in myself and others is that the work pressure that leads to burnout in SWEs is largely self-imposed.

This is how control works in our society. It's true for all people.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han explains it well in "The Burnout Society".

> the work pressure that leads to burnout in SWEs is largely self-imposed

Nothing happens in a vacuum and this "self-imposed" work pressure often happens within the a company culture that is either intentionally or accidentally highly demanding of individuals. The "self-imposed" is a false front for enforced expectations from colleagues, managers and clients.

We're all in unique situations and you can say if you don't like it then don't work there. However the hustle and start up cultures are viral and spread throughout the industry. Just look at all the talk of Elon Musk & his Twitter and Doge employees working 100 hours weeks and sleeping at the office. Regardless of politics, there are many people who talk about this insane, unhealthy and inefficient level of work as a good and worthy thing. It's the Puritan work ethic myth. In reality the majority of the benefit of this work does not go to the individual doing the work, instead they pay a heavy cost with their quality of life.

I'd add 3: most of us really like this stuff. Sometimes I get pinged in the evening for some issue. I have the freedom to say I'll check it out in the morning, or on Monday. Sometimes I do, but often I'll look at it. There's definitely a little bit of 2 in there, but mostly it's because checking it out is fun, and solving it is rewarding.

I try not to overdo it. You can still burn out from that sort of thing even if you like it. But as long as it's not excessive, I enjoy the occasional "Sorry it's late, but are you around to take a look at this?"

I've legit never known of a place that hires SWEs that matches this description.

Except maybe the sweet gig SWEs got at Twitter before Musk.

No wonder you'd feel imposter syndrome if you'd landed a gig that good. Anyone would.

this doesnt apply to 90% of programming jobs so im not so sure the money growth expectation disilusion angle is right.

I generally assume it is due to lack of agency.

I think burnout is Cool Hand Luke being forced to dig a ditch and fill it back up again, for days.

It’s putting in effort without seeing anything concrete to show for it.

If you tar a roof, you can see a roof that will keep out the rain. If you cook a meal, you see someone who was hungry but now full. A lot of jobs don’t have that feedback loop.

>I think one thing that needs to be understood better is the concept of "burnout".

I can explain it pretty well.

You can classify pretty much all jobs into 2 categories - map lookups and reasoning.

A map lookup job is something where you learn to associate a specific problem with a solution. Most jobs are like this. You go work in construction, its pretty much map lookup - supervisor tells you to go prep the concrete, you know the procedure to do it, you go do it. Even high end jobs like VPs are often map lookups, you aren't really thinking about solving any problems, just following the standard procedure of what works and are essentially relying on the actual work of lower ranked people to give you data.

Reasoning jobs are those where you don't have the solution for a particular problem in memory, so you figure it out. For example, business strategy, despite being non technical, is a reasoning problem - there are a lot of variables you have to consider, and success in this regard often involves things like figuring out what you have to do, which is a separate task than actually doing it.

Software engineering is interesting because it can be both. Setting up standard service stacks is often a map lookup job. The interviews themselves test on map lookup really, as most of the problems fall within the scope of pointer manipulation or n-linked lists, with memorizing specific hard ones in case you get asked those. But fundamentally, software development is a reasoning type job.

The burnout happens when someone in software engineering is good at map lookup, but is actually needed to do reasoning, and has no education or training on how to do the latter. For example, I worked at Amazon. Id estimate that if I asked a random sample of 100 engineers to give me http traffic from a service, 1 out of 100 of them would know how to do it, and only about 10 or so would be able to actually go figure it out on their own.

This is why people who are good at reasoning can really do any job well. If you take a software engineer who is extremely competent and can build complex solutions, and make them in charge of optimizing things like delivery, shipping and warehouse storage, or finance management of a company (excluding the emotional response to those jobs), they would be able to do it well.

Whereas people who are good at map lookups tend to be only good at certain jobs in certain quantities.

> On the other hand, try telling a construction worker how hard our lives are sitting in chairs clicking buttons.

Construction workers usually chose to do that job instead of call center, cashier or elderly care for instance. The perception of what's stressful or "hard" is I think different (illegal workers who can't do these jobs in the first place being another can of worms)

I also think this is the same perspective for burnout, repetitively doing something that is felt as mind crushing will be a trigger, but what is felt as mind cushing vastly depend on individuals, preferences and predispositions. I don't think there's a single yardstick for that.

I did physical labour when I was younger in a tropical climate and in certain ways it's easier than my SWE job is now.

There are days in SWE where I feel completely and utterly drained and brain dead despite doing nothing but just "clicking buttons". The physical exercise from the job site in comparison was heaven a lot of the time, and even these days when I'm stuck in my 4th useless meeting of the day, I find myself yearning for shovelling in the scorching sun.

> My dad used to have to do things like hot tar roofing to pay the bills. So I still consider it a blessing to get to work in software.

It is a blessing, but it’s also important to recognize who tends to end up in the tech industry.

Many of us are well-suited for software work because disabilities or other constraints make many other careers inaccessible.

The alternative is poverty.

Being a worker doesn't mean "working class". That phrase pretty specifically is for people who do some sort of physical work. We fall under "professional class", people who mostly do knowledge work, traditionally at a desk in an office. They're both generally considered part of the middle class.

> Us tech workers could be leveraging the privilege we have to get better conditions for everyone.

Yes.

A bit of context here: I am European and take for granted many things related to social safety (healthcare, benefits, parental leave, or various sorts) and equal opportunity (free education, public transportation, etc.). Many views of Bernie Sanders are mainstream by European standards (vide https://www.quora.com/How-far-to-the-left-is-Bernie-Sanders-...).

Yet, in Poland, there are various lower taxes for software engineers (and some other similar professionals). I don't consider it fair. Yes, many people feel that they work hard (and they do!) or that their friends earn even more.

But at the same time, it takes talking with anyone in education, retail, or care to see that what is considered unacceptable pay for any IT job is, for many, a dream salary. While inequality is not nearly as enormous as in the US, it is still.

So yes, if these are system changes that benefit all workers - wonderful!

> A perfect example is non-compete clauses.

Yes.

In Europe, you are often paid by the previous employer if you have such a clause. So, it only makes sense in a reasonable case where you could directly pass know-how on to the competitors. But not as a leash.

> How is this easy mode

There's jobs where you work 80 hours per week to maybe make $50-60k, and are so physical your body will be shot by 40 or 50...

Devs get compensated extremely well.

No industry has 0% unemployment. Most people would kill for the employability of the median software engineer.

Software developers, unlike many other professions, can be self taught at almost no cost. You don't need a license, you don't need to pass any qualifying/gatekeeping exams, you don't need expensive tools, you don't need any supplies or inventory. Consequently there is a never-ending supply of new young developers who are hungrier than you and will do the work for less or do more work for the same.

Software engineers do basically no physical labor

I developed debilitating tendinitis in both wrists right about the time I graduated college. A decade later, I developed a bulged disc in my neck that ended my career.

There are very real risks to your body from sitting at a computer, deep in thought all day. There's a whole other swath of health issues, too, beside injury risks.

as a once remote cottage guy, yes you can have internet. kids love it out there. you bring your friends.

its better out there man. i miss it.

I was waking up with no alarm to blue sky and chirping birds, and then I could read papers and to pytorch all day. Never heard a car.

Some tangential thoughts and rambles on this to try to get at the deeper issues, first from Jeff Schmidt about his book "Disciplined Minds" which encourages solidarity of intellectual workers: https://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ "Who are you going to be? That is the question. In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy. Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

An even deeper point though from "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black: https://web.archive.org/web/20080702023453/http://www.whywor... "Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By “play” I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. ..."

Or, from a different direction, from "Buddhist Economics" by EF Schumacher: https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/buddhist-econ... "The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."

And also from an even different direction by Marshall Sahlins' "The Original Affluent Society": https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/298-june-19-1979/the-ori... "For there are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be “easily satisfied” either by producing much or desiring little. The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way, makes assumptions peculiarly appropriate to market economies: that man’s wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improvable: thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that “urgent goods” become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own: that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty—with a low standard of living. ... The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization. It has grown with civilization, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation—that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo. ..."

Or from an even different direction as a cautionary tale (spoilers if you read the Wikipedia article beyond what I quoted): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands_... ""With Folded Hands ..." is a 1947 science fiction novelette[1] by American writer Jack Williamson (1908–2006). In writing it, Willamson was influenced by the aftermath of World War II, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his concern that "some of the technological creations we had developed with the best intentions might have disastrous consequences in the long run."[2] ... Despite the humanoids' benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. ..."

Or also touching on that theme, "The Skills of Xanadu" story by Theodore Sturgeon that helped create Ted Nelson's "Xanadu" and hypertext and so indirectly the world wide web: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 https://ia601205.us.archive.org/22/items/theodore-sturgeon-/...

Or also on re-envisioning work and status: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear "The Mayflower II has brought with it thousands of settlers, all the trappings of the authoritarian regime along with bureaucracy, religion, fascism and a military presence to keep the population in line. However, the planners behind the generation ship did not anticipate the direction that Chironian society took: in the absence of conditioning and with limitless robotic labor and fusion power, Chiron has become a post-scarcity economy. Money and material possessions are meaningless to the Chironians and social standing is determined by individual talent, which has resulted in a wealth of art and technology without any hierarchies, central authority or armed conflict. In an attempt to crush this anarchist adhocracy, the Mayflower II government employs every available method of control; however, in the absence of conditioning the Chironians are not even capable of comprehending the methods, let alone bowing to them. The Chironians simply use methods similar to Gandhi's satyagraha and other forms of nonviolent resistance to win over most of the Mayflower II crew members, who had never previously experienced true freedom, and isolate the die-hard authoritarians."

Or more down-to-Earth by Doug Engelbart (creator of the 1960s Mother of All Demos showing interactive collaborative computing and teleconferencing and the mouse): https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/191/ "In Doug Engelbart's terms, an improvement community is any group involved in a collective pursuit to improve a given capability or condition. Some examples include a professional association, a community of practice, consortium, humanitarian initiative, initiatives to reform education, healthcare, government, corporate initiatives, a medical research community seeking to cure a specific disease. An improvement community that also puts focused attention on improving how it engages, and how it improves, by employing better and better practices and tools, is a networked improvement community (NIC)."

Where a "networked improvement community" also connects with Brian Eno's idea of "Scenius": https://medium.com/salvo-faraday/what-is-the-scenius-15409eb... "There’s a common myth that genius is only produced and achieved in isolation. This is commonly referred to as the “Great Man Theory”, that innovation in art and culture only comes from great men working in solitude. Brian Eno, musician, producer, and inventor of the term “scenius”, describes scenius as similar to genius except embedded in a scene rather than in genes. ..."

And by Howard Zinn on "The Coming Revolt of the Guards": https://historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html "The new conditions of technology, economics, and war, in the atomic age, make it less and less possible for the guards of the system-the intellectuals, the home owners, the taxpayers, the skilled workers, the professionals, the servants of government-to remain immune from the violence (physical and psychic) inflicted on the black, the poor, the criminal, the enemy overseas."

Other stuff I have collected on improving organizations (and ourselves): https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations...

Anyway, people can debate on whether unions will improve the day-to-day experience of software developers including regarding "burnout", but that is just scratching the surface of social change related to work compared to ideas like above.

> I also think using the "it could be worse" excuse to avoid working for better conditions that are totally feasible isn't a great thing to do.

Unions fuck up the incentives. Tenured positions are coveted and come with privileges that make the job easier and the position more cushy. New hires want those perks and will rest once they attain them. This is the opposite of what you want in a workforce: you want the top 50% to work hard and fight for raises and promotions.

In our industry, when we don't get the promotions or raises we want, we switch jobs. Job switching has been an incredible means of advancing our careers and being exposed to new tech and new problems. Because of tenure and different jobs using different unions, unions will lead to fewer job changes and more "lifers" that stick around at a single job for a long time. That ossifies code, stops the influx of new ideas and talent, and causes super weird code / business unit ownership drama. It's also super boring.

Tech companies aren't afraid of high salaries (evidently so!) as much as they are of non-fungibility and ossification of the workforce. Unions make slow businesses even slower. Because of this, unions lead to offshoring.

Unions have ground so many industries to a halt in the US. Manufacturing, automotive. Most recently, the film industry (particularly crew) have been offshored -- in the last several years productions have moved to Eastern Europe and Asia sans any US workforce. They fly the cast (without crew) out for the shoots. It's all because of unions.

If we wish this upon ourselves -- in one of the cushiest careers in the world -- we'll soon find all of our jobs moving overseas.

Exactly. Google even explicitly says that T4 is a terminal level, i.e. they're happy to pay you a high salary for 40 hours per week of protobuf copying and the occasional design doc.

> I'm here because they give me money. That's where my obligation ends.

This is reality, but we are expected to serve like dancing monkeys jumping through hoops to make up some cult-like zeal-for-productivity story to get through the interview.

I'm sorry, what?

Most of us would trade our jobs in an instant for a nice fang role where we had 0 oncall. I don't think that option is on the table for everybody.

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I strongly do not think that things like 80 hour weeks, abuse, uncaring managers, and especially AGILE of all things are super common at FAANG. If you join a startup (in any industry) I think there's an understanding that you will probably work over 40 hours a week and that things will generally be hectic. Many companies will openly advertise this and tell you if you ask.

I really found myself wondering who the audience was for this. The person who works hard, produces quality engineering artifacts, and DOESN'T have options at other companies? I don't think that person exists?

> The author is clear that they're talking about "billion dollar tech companies" for an audience of those people called to them.

> We’re in an industry where burnout isn’t just common - it’s expected. If you’re not pulling all-nighters, you’re "not committed." If you’re not answering Slack messages at midnight, you’re "not a team player." This culture is toxic, and it’s only getting worse. The relentless churn of projects, the constant pressure to innovate, and the ever-present threat of obsolescence create a perfect storm of stress.

No, the author is generalizing what work at a billion dollar tech company is like to the whole industry. I've never worked for a company similar to the one described in this post, and I think that the vast majority of people in tech haven't either. Silicon valley is not the world.

Either ways, unionizing sounds like a great idea.

> I want to retire and be able to actually enjoy it.

In hindsight the goal of retirement seems so weird.

Nobody can save their time into an account (your hours of life cannot be transferred). I have many friends that died before 65, or I know retirees with health issues that severely interfere with enjoyment of life.

In theory we can save money by investing for later (money ≠ time). In practice I strongly believe our governments will steal our investments... Demographics suggest that governments will go broke and so governments will take what whatever they can.

I'm in New Zealand and there are clear signals to me that retirement savers will get rug-pulled by our government (changes to age/$ thresholds, but also other various taxation suggestions). A government cannot reduce spending because either (1) voters don't like that or (2) other powerful beneficiaries {businesses, politicians} fight against it.

Background: I chose bootstrapped startup life in my 30s and got a small success by 50 and I'm now possibly retired. I wished I had payed more attention to what retirees actually do because previously I understood little.

Great. Show me examples of teams who took that bet and how it paid off.

> The bet is that if we collectively use unions correctly,

This sounds awfully similar to when people were holding their iPhones wrong.

this is a great example of the kind of things unions should talk about when doing tech organizing.

too often, unions pitch themselves on fixing problems that are low on the hierarchy of needs in a particular job (e.g., will this job kill/maim you? do you make enough money to feed yourself?) and it just doesn't resonate with the types of problems that tech folks have.

but pre-IPO equity deals are something that all employees hate and are completely powerless to change as individuals.

We don't need software unions. We need to break up big tech.

Software companies should be able to hire and fire. We often need to have 24/7 oncall. Needs are flexible. Startups must be nimble.

It's the tech giants that are ruining it for everyone. They're preventing new centicorns from forming. They're forcing underpriced M&A for successes, moving into markets with infinite money and killing upstarts before they find legs. They own every platform, every discovery mechanism, and they tax more than governments do.

Big tech recently figured out they could pay off everyone and put pricing pressure back on the engineers that built their market position. Previously they were worried engineers could leave and start upstart competitors. That's why they hired everyone and paid top of band salaries. Now that they realize there is no governmental antitrust legislation to fear, they just crush everything.

They're in search of infinite growth, so they move into new markets like Hollywood movies and primary care doctors and undercut everyone. They market themselves for free at the top of their websites and app stores (or print giant ads on their delivery trucks and cardboard packaging). Things that would cost competitors hundreds of millions of dollars to do.

The problem is 100% big tech.

We need to break up big tech.

Forming the union is step one of a long road before you actually reap the benefits. It can take year(s) to negotiate the CBA with your employer. Sounds like fear of layoffs was a huge factor, but the employer must agree to those terms, and that remains to be seen. So for now that's all rhetoric. Show me a team that has gotten to the other side with these terms in a contract.

I did just that about a year ago and regularly see people who work even less than me, i.e. not even 5 chill days a week, but 4 or 3. It works so far.

Or Sveriges Ingenjörer.

It does no such thing. It shifts power from the employer to the union bosses.

> Maybe those organizing a concrete workplace would be able to give you concrete answers

Maybe that's why I've never seen anyone trying to unionize a workplace I've been in.

The abstract idea of a union has been enough to spark a lot of unionization efforts because workers knew exactly what they wanted to ask for. Safety equipment, overtime pay, health benefits, etc. Things they were already asking for but didn't have the power to demand.

So... we'll see, maybe someday someone will figure out what a union could do for me.

What prevents them is sane compartmentalization. Even in accounting it's understood that you cannot defend again things like embezzlement if multiple employees cross different functions conspire, but you can defend against individuals by compartmentalizing their functions making every step further from their function more difficult to execute.

Same with tech. In a mature agency, if random dev has the ability to delete the repo and the back ups, you're doing it wrong. That said, your entire department is a threat you can't avoid. That is what a union brings to the table.

> what governance prevents workers from deleting key software products and their backups

Separation of duties, principle of least privilege, and zero trust?

Why would any worker have access to delete both the repo and its backups?

> Forming a union does not mean you are asking for anything, it means you are giving yourself protection to ask for things in the future without being fired.

The way I've always done it is that if I want something my employer won't give me, I find someone else who will and go work for them (or start my own company). What's wrong with that model?

Virtue signalling, not at all.

I work as an regular engineer in construction and I have a very cushy job compared to the boots on the ground working in the mud. I am conveying what I and everyone else thinks about tech working conditions.

Also not against unions, I have to work with unions in my day to day.

Yeah, when people choose to write an article about 'how bad they have it', don't expect sympathy from anyone else if you 'don't have it that bad'. Christ, you all get paid 3 x plus the median salary... Go work a job with better conditions that pays less! Or use your incredible market power to move to a place that does have better conditions (which you all have seem to done anyway!)

Unionise for gods sake, but jeez it would help if some of you had to scrape a little in your past prior.

Most businesses are not very profitable at all. Like 5-10% margin. If you took all their profits and made them wages (ignoring the consequences), thats not a crazy amount of pay increase especially compared to what tech workers make.

We see ourselves as underpaid, and tech workers as overpaid. (For right or wrong)

But you're completely right, Capital has done amazing job of pulling the wool over our eyes hasn't it.

Conversely, software engineers are generating considerably more profit for their employers than they receive in compensation on average. I know it's not the only metric of exploitation, but it's a hard one to ignore.

Disagree. Class consciousness is about realizing that societal classes correspond to their relation to the means of production, not the concrete wage being earned. The majority of developers is part of the proletariat, at least according to Marx.

how is the proletariat oppressed by an ordinary non-management software developer?

Social differences shouldn't make you question class consciousness. Quite the opposite is true, to be class conscious means to have recognized what economic class you are in regardless of any other features.

Hidden there is a good point though. Social differences can be leveraged as a means to deter class consciousness. Let's take the idea of the wage gap for example. Now both male and female workers can be underpaid. As a result, everyone is less likely to become class conscious and realize that, if they instead fight over a wage difference within their class.

Where is this myth about 80 hour weeks at big tech coming from? Is it all Amazon folks assuming it's the same everywhere else?

>Nobody is ever fired, but it somehow pays well above the median pay, but not comparable to the big tech.

So why would good people want to join this union when they could have a better life elsewhere?

Elseforum, I've debated this. I consider it to be more of an inside company lobbying group than a union. In particular, they have no ability to collectively bargain for a contract. None of their wins are things that have been able to be put into a contract.

Furthermore, some of the issues they've brought up have been things that are... not contractural and rather political. For example https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/press/ceasefire-demand ... while it is ok for an organization to have opinions, things that are not about the contract that the worker has with the company gets into... well... political issues and that can hinder the ability for the group to get a majority representation and be able to do the things with contracts.

All that union managed to do is get various Google contractors fired for unionizing.