Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified, and that is simply the price everyone involved must pay to maintain equilibrium.

I think there's a false perception that unions negotiate against the companies best interest.

Unions negotiate for a bigger slice of the same pie against leadership, executives, and shareholders/owners.

They have the same incentives as those to see the pie grow, but band together to negotiate that their pie be bigger and those of the above smaller than what would have been otherwise.

Most of the time when it results in squeezing the company itself it's because leadership wasn't willing to share downsides.

And this is the primary reason for unions. When things go well, leadership is rarely willing to share upsides. When things go bad, leadership is often unwilling to share downsides. Workers join union to pressure leadership in sharing both upsides and downsides.

They got ... $700 million bailout from the government and put part of the blame on not being able to secure a $50 million benefits package?

There is always a chance that management's misguided choices impact the business too heavily and drive the company under or at least greatly decrease the value of their output.

Yellow was in massive debt due to poor management decisions and the union fought against a move that would have combined driver seniority lists from various companies they managed, which they suspected was going to be used to cut people's jobs .

The union did what it thought was best for all its members, and the company was in so much debt it couldn't figure out how to fulfill those needs another way.

This is not a "see unions are bad" example.

Since that harms the union members the it wouldn't make sense for them to do that intentionally.

Yes, because companies never go out of business or kill products for no reason under our glorious people's free market. Google, famously, never ends good products for no reason.

I don't think workers are to blame when it the business who makes the deals both with the employees and other business.

If I make a series of bad deals running my company and my employees take up collection action to demand a reasonable market rate increase in pay my business didn't fail because of collective action. It failed because I failed as ab businessman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Corporation#cite_note-W...

I wasn't aware that id software made Concorde.

There are movie flops, yet also there is an actors union. Workers are allowed to be paid even if management makes bad decisions. The company can go bankrupt, doesn't mean workers shouldn't get paid.

Unpopular opinion but I'm okay with treating union members better than non.

It's good to know that once you make it you are safe. It's okay to grind and give 110% on the come-up. Unsustainable drive, passion, fire. But there has got to be a point where you can ease off to giving 90%, even 85%.

Jobs are a part of society, and the society needs to create structures that make room for people to pull back and focus on other things like raising a family.

What happened to it? Last time I heard only good things about those guys, but that was around the release of DOOM in 2016.

Companies are doing amazingly well by any metric. They just refuse to share with their employees.

Actually a lot of people are saying that. Almost everyone except for those very few people and the bubble/membrane in their orbit.

Ask Google about "difference between industrial and craft union".

There's US labor history involved. The AFL-CIO was formed by a 1955 merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The AFL was the umbrella organization for the craft unions - electricians, plumbers, etc. The CIO was the umbrella organization for the industrial unions - everybody non-management in an auto plant, everybody non-management in a steel mill, etc. That's what "wall to wall" means.

Agreeing on the bargaining unit is a major issue in employer-union relations. A "wall to wall" agreement avoids internal issues over who can do what job. (Is plumbing for compressed air a plumber or a steamfitter job?) That helps the employer. But it gives the union more leverage over the employer because the union has all the employees.

In my experience, getting management recognition for overtime is an uphill battle.

Even when I did get paid at some elevated rate, if we divided actual hours worked with the money I got, I still made way less than my hourly rate.

> Everyone is exempt,

This comes with a catch in California. In order to make software developers exempt there is a minimum salary you must pay otherwise you are required to keep them hourly and pay overtime where appropriate.

https://www.dir.ca.gov/oprl/ComputerSoftware.htm

If you enjoy your job your employer is able to exploit you more?

i have a passion for eating, i dont have a passion for dentistry

> If you want that, you’d have to negotiate for it, and now doesn’t seem like a great time.

Software engineers can be pretty foolish. When we had more power, unions were unpopular because too many imbibed some libertarian propaganda, looked at their high salaries, and decided to cosplay as bosses. Now that power is slipping away, and will slip away faster because we did little to preserve it to our determent.

Also the technology union people were dumb, seemed to focus more on hot-button political activism than worker power, and thus undermined their own project. IMHO, a union should be monomanically about representing worker interests and stay far away from any other kind of issue, because controversy around those issues allows the bosses to divide-and-conquer the union.

And CWA is part of AFL-CIO, which is the largest federation of unions in the country, representing ~15 million workers.

That's how it works in other countries. Unions are per industry, not per business, because per business is... weird and not really helpful.

The union negotiates salary ranges for the entire industry, so it doesn't matter if one company is being difficult, their organisation (the one that organises the employers of that industry) have agreed to the ranges on their behalf.

If you need to go on strike, the union members employed at other businesses can help cover wages. Your union can also call for sympathy strikes at other businesses, putting additional pressure on the misbehaving company.

Is there an alternative union that you think Id employees should have joined?

"Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running."

Can you tell me where you work, and are you hiring???

Losing devs that built a service, its infrastructure, build pipelines, tests, etc. Can sometimes mean losing deep knowledge.

Sometimes an issue arises and without that deep knowledge you'll be waiting weeks for a fix. Better hope it isnt a critical issue like a serious vulnerability or that you can hire the deep knowledge on a temporary consultancy contract.

Sometimes services are fully rewritten from scratch because the new devs cant get a build of the old service to compile/run/do the thing™.

Staring down the barrel of being primary on-call over Christmas for a dozen k8s clusters running thousands of nodes. How I wish it were true that we could trust computer programs to just keep running.

PagerDuty wouldn't exist if this were true.

Every on-call rotation I've ever been on would like a word.

You do realize that, um, software need hardware. And also security upgrades often require software engineers. And uh, software maintenance is what engineers actually do most of the time.

It only takes one bad deployment to bring huge swaths of the internet down nowadays, just look at Cloudflare, AWS, etc. costing millions of dollars in downstream economic impact.

Sure, a platform will continue to run on a given day without intervention, but that’s like playing Russian roulette: at some point you’ll need intervention and you’ll likely need it fast.

I generally agree with this take. Some specific unions, especially in the US, seem unnecessarily adversarial to employers, but others are known primarily for upholding professional and safety standards (I'm thinking of electricians we contracted with at a previous job).

Being forced to join the union to have a job there is little different from being forced to become an employee of the company in order to work in the store. It's extremely common to have a requirement to become part of some organization in order to work in a place, it's just that this organization is usually a for-profit business, and typically you only have to join one.

People think very weirdly about unions. If you strip away all the fluff, a union is ultimately a business that sells labor, typically with a setup where the buyer(s) of that labor pay the labor directly, and then the labor pays the supplier, rather than having the money flow through the supplier first. The direction of money flow is unusual, but makes no practical difference.

All you're describing is an exclusive arrangement between a supplier and a business that buys from them. If it was a contracting agency instead of a union, and your family member was told that the only way to work in the store was to go through the agency, you wouldn't bat an eye. But call it a "union" and suddenly "he got squeezed."

How was my comment dishonest?

I think you can have a nuanced view on immigration.

I'm fairly pro-immigration but I think the current immigration system in the US is highly exploitive to just about everyone. H1B, in particular, is pretty much entirely a system of putting immigrants in a bad situation that makes it hard for them to challenge their employers.

So much of the US immigration system is built on undercutting wages for native workers.

IMO, more than anything immigrants need a lot more protections particularly from deportation. If we want to punish someone for using undocumented immigrants it shouldn't be the immigrant, it should be the business owner that employed them. But also, if someone has been here for 10 years without causing problems there should be a fast path to citizenship.

I've know a family of undocumented workers that have been in the US for the last 30+ years. They don't have citizenship because it's too expensive and to complex for them to get through. Yet there they've been working on cattle farms, babysitting, paying taxes, and teaching me a bit of Spanish.

I think it’s a little more nuanced than that. They are against things that would lessen the collective bargaining power of those in their union. This is the whole point of unions, to collectively bargain.

If those immigrants were forced to join the union upon entering the U.S. and entering that sector of work, I don’t see the union having a problem with that. The issue is that would lead to those immigrants and all other members of the union being paid more, which is a no-no for the billionaire class.

So they’re not anti-immigrant. They’re against billionaires abusing immigration to pay people less.

That's not true. The MLBPA (baseball players) is definitely not anti-immigrant.

The an_cap position on immigration is open borders which is the opposite of "people who can be deported if they complain about their working conditions". Feel free to check the comment history.

Yeah the distributed nature of tech makes unionizing naturally difficult - multiple offices with different reporting chains, remote teams, etc. The way CWA handled this for Alphabet is a sort of fake "PR" union where the company is under no obligation to bargain with you and you don't really any of the protections.

An app could maybe help here as well to define more viable bargaining units - like "the QA team" rather than the "NYC Office" which may have thousands of employees with different eligibility and reporting chains.

Would you be opposed to a tech bro making a startup out of this? :)

Being interchangeable is literally why unions are formed. If you have some unique skill set that is valued, a union is unnecessary and would hold you back. If you’re happy being slotted in to whatever the next available position is based on your seniority with no regard to you as an individual, unions are great.

That’s why they’re mostly autoworkers or longshoremen and whatnot an not professionals, outside a few niches motivated by ideology.