You may have heard someone over the past few years talk about web developers like they're the new blue collar worker. There is some truth in that statement, seeing as it can take a salary from a job in the technology sector to live comfortably in America. There's at least one thing missing from this analogy. Blue collar workers have labor unions, we don’t.
The portrait of a blue collar worker
The economy in 50s America enabled a sole breadwinner in the family to provide enough to pay the bills, put food on the table and even take the family on a vacation. The uneven distribution of wealth today in America prevents blue collar workers from having the same level of freedom. This is not necessarily true of technology jobs, where the median salary for some positions can be well over $100,000 annually.
It's complicated for some people
There are some of us in the technology sector who still have a difficult time making ends meet when housing prices are high, employer provided insurance refuses to cover medical bills, student loans prohibit some of us from obtaining credit. Sometimes we are forced to trade salary for benefits and job security when converting from contract to full-time.
The recruiting situation could be way better
When web engineers are laid off they often have to rely on a disconnected network of recruiters to acquire a new job. The recruiters are often not very concerned about your well-being and solely interested in the money they make off the transaction of finding you a job. It sounds good on paper. The recruiter has an incentive to get you a higher salary. But often that can be at the expense of good benefits or even full-time status. The recruiter will also not be there for you when things go wrong. It's in their best interest for you to keep the job.
There isn't any incentive for corporations to change
There is hardly ever any accountability or incentive for the employer to change corporate culture. Maybe you are lucky enough to work in a decent environment with coworkers who also have a healthy work-life balance. That is not the case for so many people who work at corporations with a toxic environment. It is hard to change corporate culture. Sometimes it can take drastic measures like a work stoppage or a strike. But who is brave enough to orchestrate such an ordeal? It takes a lot of organization and energy to rally everyone behind the cause.
The lack of standardized testing and certification
We've all taken the unbearable tests. If someone came in and offered proper certifications, some of that could go away. When a candidate is certifiable they have already proven their expertise. Some of us have employers who will pay for continuing education, while others do not. It can be hard to stay relevant with the changing landscape of technology especially when someone is comfortable at a job. What if there was a highly visible organization that provided continuing education and industry-wide recognized certification for a reasonable fee?
The overwhelming amount of contract positions
Contract jobs are challenging for most. If you have to operate as a sole proprietorship now you have the added responsibility of maintaining a business mostly for tax purposes. You may also need to track down affordable insurance and other benefits if the company you contract with doesn't offer these perks or has really horrible options. You'll be day dreaming nine months in at your job, thinking wouldn't it be nice when vacation rolls around. But it won't, unless you figure out how to save and be able to take a hit from not getting paid while on vacay. What if someone had your back and made sure with every contract position you also got at least three weeks vacation?
The current process for salary negotiations results in inequality
The employer or recruiter will always justify it with your slightly higher salary than if you were hired full-time, but that's a bunch of baloney. There are people working full-time that make more than you do in your contract. Someone negotiated a better rate and received it. Then there's the problem where women are often paid less than men in the same position. Then there's the issue of locality. We allow corporations to pay someone in another country far less for the same job. We need an organization who can stop this inequality in its tracks and provide a fair and balanced approach.
It's hard to settle disputes when things go bad
Have you ever had a client stiff you for thousands of dollars and then claim you didn’t finish the work even though you did meet the requirements? It can be a struggle to get paid. The amount your former client owes you can be over the limit for small claims court and well below the amount that would make a lawyer interested in representing you. It can be even harder to bring a wrongful termination suit against a corporation. It also means you don’t have a reference from your last job. What if you had access to a resource that would provide legal representation in situations you are clearly owed money?
Someone needs to hold the corporations accountable
Why should we have put put up with clients not paying us for our services? Why should we have to depend on a disparate network of recruiters? Why do we put up with the state of job interviews in technology? How does meaningful change happen for women in tech when the government fails to mandate fair income laws?
It takes an organization of dedicated people to fix these kinds problems. This is where a labor union can help.
Labor unions use collective bargaining to secure better working conditions for its members. Being part of a labor union gives you negotiating power.
What are the benefits of being in a union?
- Collective bargaining
- Better working conditions
- Provides training for new skills
- Standardized wages
- Negotiating power for better benefits / pay
- Pension benefits
If people working in technology were to form a union, I'm sure they could overcome some of the bury
There has to be an incentive
There will be resistance to the idea of a labor union in technology at first. Change is difficult, especially for the conservatives who usually end up running major corporations. Greed is a powerful drug. There would have to be a huge incentive for corporations to abandon the status quo.
The labor union would have to provide a superior, well-educated and experienced workforce. The union would have to simply the process of finding and hiring talent for HR at corporations.
There are probably more incentives for corporations, but the point of a labor union would largely be to protect people working in tech. Labor unions won't solve all of our problems, however I believe a labor union could make life better for those of us working in technology.
What do you think?
Top comments (70)
No thanks, I live in Europe where most of that is already covered and protected by law.
By the way, the standardized test and certification thing sounds to me very detrimental to a sector that evolves at the speed that our does.
Some of us are not so fortunate. The state of testing is already very bad. I’ve taken probably over 100 tests in the past 20 years and haven’t seen them moving at the speed of light. On the contrary, I’m still asked completely asinine questions.
The whole idea behind a very clear cut certification for various technologies is so you wouldn’t have to take tests written by people who are not qualified to even conduct a test. The certification could be a living document. It doesn’t have to stagnate.
And who would decide what is the correct test method and content? And the new ones?
If a technology or framework starts gaining traction should it be tested before or after it is widely spread? What technologies are going to be tested? because depending on the vertical business your company is, the technologies used can vary a lot.
This is what I mean, I think this is one of those things that sounds good on paper and is proposed in good faith but at the end of the day is detrimental to everyone.
Perhaps it’s time to hand over test curation to academics, you know the people trained in education who are actually qualified to create rubric, define meaningful test questions and conduct a test with some integrity.
I disagree that certification is detrimental. On the contrary, studying for a certification can be quite rewarding. You’ll learn things you may not have otherwise known. I for one want to work with people who continually learn.
Do you mean the same academics that haven't coded in decades?
Ugh. Nothing is absolute.
I'm not saying it as an absolute, what I'm trying to make you see is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Sorry don’t see it. You’re talking to one of those academics.
So, how would you test if someone knows how to measure cohesion vs coupling and how to decide the correct balance?
How to choose a technology for that vertical? How to plan a refactor of a 10-year-old codebase?
Testing little things like proficiency in X or Y is easy, that is why certifications exist. Real software engineering challenges are still debated how are best solved, how will you test it then?
😑
You are getting way into the minutia for a post that is mostly about worker’s rights. No one is arguing an interview should be devoid of conversation or even debate. There are certainly questions that could be asked that aren’t covered by certification. That doesn’t mean certifications aren’t also valuable.
I'm not attacking you, don't take me wrong. I'm just trying to challenge your ideas to avoid a little "happy bubble".
In my country, unions do great things and are historically responsible for lots of workers rights but the big ones have turned into an extension of the political parties and are used to keep workers in check and perpetuate the status quo. The tests done by them are mostly political and focused on gaining money and ripe with corruption and all of that happened in less than 20 years. Do you think it would fare differently in the states?
My advice, if you want it, is to promote socialism instead of unions. If by law you have paid vacations, maternity and paternity paid leave(ideally with both being in equal length to avoid discrimination against women), a livable minimum wage and universal healthcare you won't need any unions.
Unions were needed when socialism was an unknown scary thing for the elites and the workers had to force it, now you people just need to vote for parties that want to implement the same we have in all the European Union.
I don’t feel attacked. 🤷♂️ Try saying the word socialism in America and see where that gets you. It’s still a scary thing.
In Germany, we call it “social market economy”, so it doesn’t sound that scary. See where it got us 😊
We have all benefits André mentioned plus most software developers working in larger companies are actually part of the union that organizes engineers in general.
Great question! I don't have an answer, but have been wondering the same thing. I spend a lot of time thinking about employee rights, and how we should be pushing for things like:
These are all things that young/healthy/privileged employees may not even notice, but they can hit hard once you need them.
Not sure how related this is, but I also think about how software engineers should be held responsible for the code they write. It shouldn't be an option to write inaccessible code as a way to save time or money - we should have a code of ethics that prevents us from doing work like that. This is a thing in other industries, so I'm not sure why that doesn't exist for us.
THIS! SO MUCH MORE OF THIS! 🤯
I totally agree with the responsibility part. The code of ethics is an amazing idea! What if the union could have a code of ethics everyone abides by? That way corporations who hire out of the union know they are getting someone who will responsibly develop. Of course I'm saying this just after I just made a gigantic table keyboard accessible. It would be nice if I could go to a place where similar minded folks hung out.
ACM and IEEE have adopted a code of ethics for software engineers, but it's not anything that's enforced (as far as I know):
ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/soft...
Definitely always pushing for better benefits and compensations is a good thing. It is better for employees to understand their value to the company and know how to negotiate than have a formal union with all the overhead though IMO.
No thanks here. It seems I'm not facing the problems you describe, so adding more bureaucracy to the situation does not seem desirable. And if I can be utterly frank, we're talking about office jobs with above average pay. Such measures should be reserved for work where life and limb are at risk and extreme forms of exploitation. (One that comes to mind is the traveling salespeople. You know, those people that ring your door on Saturday. Many of them are paid next-to-nothing, legally, because their work crosses state lines. And they might essentially be held hostage with the threat of being left wherever the crew happens to be if they quit. Many of them are from disadvantaged backgrounds, so the threat of being left homeless in an unfamiliar place is very real.)
No one is proposing taking resources away from those in need. Over the past 5 years I've personally experienced or know someone who has experienced every problem I described. I'm sure others can too. I'm not saying the situation is desperate (maybe for some people living paycheck to paycheck it is on the brink), but the situation could be way better.
Who do you think is going to ensure women are offered an equal wage?
Re-edited this first part, since what I quoted originally isn't there.
I think you have to be careful about how this question is taken. I'll assume you mean: what can we do to fix the pay inequity among different genders (and other attributes)? Lending privilege is a great start.
Resources are finite. You can't have more without taking it from somewhere. That includes an inflated cost of goods and services for industries with unions. But in cases where people can literally die or be extremely exploited without them, it seems worth paying more to prevent that. So, who do you propose pays for the software union overhead? (Not the dues, but the addition process road blocks it will put up before people can do the work.) The consumers of software who probably make less than the engineers who create it? That's ultimately where the money will come from. Business just passes it on to customers in the price of goods and services.
I will just have to respectfully disagree. I'm not meaning to put words in your mouth.
You don't have to take a union away from someone to give a union to another. That is just too simplistic.
But you also haven't answered my question. How are people who are disadvantaged in technology (either because of their gender / race or because they are simply a lower class of employee: a contractor) supposed to get some representation without a union?
It's almost 2020 and women aren't paid as well as men and contractors don't get the same kind of benefits most of the time like paid vacation, sick leave or health benefits. I expect better for these people.
I think if there were an easy universal answer that I could write in what fits here, then it would already be a solved problem.
For me personally, the answer for most of the concerns would be that I would find a different job. And as I just indirectly stated above, that strategy won't work for all situations everywhere. And neither will unions fix all situations everywhere. But they will certainly increase the overall cost to develop software.
It's not that simple for most people to just find a different job. Even when they do its a gamble and the situation can be far worse. I've worked in places where there were amazing benefits to places that only hire contractors and don't give them any benefits. I would like to see some evidence that a labor union would drive up the cost of developing software. It just sounds too easy to be true.
I will Wally-reflector your Wally-reflector. :) I would like to see evidence that introducing labor unions maintain or lower the price of goods and services. :)
By the way, I'm keeping it light here. I mean to imply no angry feelings or anything like that. Just expressing thoughts. Best wishes to you and your family. Seriously!
Organizing software developers seems to be more or less an exercise in herding cats, except that senior cats are able to negotiate for themselves at least as well independently as they could collectively. This won't hold true forever, of course. But the only way I can think of for labor unions to get a real foothold in this industry is for a significant fraction of workers at a major concern -- on the level of a Microsoft, an Alphabet, or an Alibaba -- to organize.
So far workers at some of these companies have been able to exert some degree of collective pressure on their employers. Google dropped out of the JEDI contract competition; Microsoft's PAC, which had been donating to some of the worst people in the US government, has just recently been put on ice. I'm hoping that these and other collective actions can eventually grow into something which gives workers at those & other companies a more persistent voice in the uses to which their labor is put, but I suppose time will tell.
Am I correct in thinking this is a decidedly American problem? In the UK most of these issues are covered in law.
Unions did some great work in the 60s in the UK. Then became beasts they tried to destroy in the 70s. And then they brought the wrath of the Government down in the 80s and now the general public consensus is that "Unions on paper sound great, but people can't be trusted to manage them".
It’s a problem anywhere corporations can exploit workers.
Fantastic!
I especially love the “too much bureaucracy” argument. As if a bunch of people who work in tech were about start using hand written forms or something.
Thank you for the kind words.
Unions are an anti-pattern in a free and competitive economy. While the IT market may not be perfectly competitive overall, the programming job market in nearly there. We have a vibrant ecosystem of all kinds of jobs ranging from full-time to contractual to even freelance and gig based economy. If you are proficient in a coding skill and are willing to accept the market wage, there is no way you won't get a programming job in today's world.
Unlike those "blue collar workers", we have a good idea of how much a programmer should get paid. We have access to all the stats and information online and unlike them, our skills have perfect mobility. Heck, we can even work remotely through our laptops if we want!
Even the consideration of "forming a union" in our kind of trade sounds ridiculous! We are no different than doctors, accountants or mechanical engineers in this regard.
😐 All the professions you listed have unions
American Society Of Mechanical Engineers asme.org/
Union Of American Physicians and Dentists uapd.com/all-doctors-need-a-union/
Union of Accountants and Auditors ifac.org/about-ifac/membership/mem...
While that may be true, these are more of a "namby pamby club" or meetup kinda unions where like-minded individuals share their learning. I thought we are talking about industrial unions, the kind that fights against capitalist corps and employers for the worker's rights and wages?
I’m saying it can be both or either, that’s up for discussion.
It’s about time we figure out a way for women to get paid an equal wage and help enable minorities who are otherwise discriminated against find employment IMHO. We also need to deal with the unequal footing created by the contractor culture in America. I don’t know how that noble goal is an “anti-pattern”.
Most of the testing and certifications I've seen have very little to do with your ability as a developer, rather just focusing a tiny piece of non-related code.
And the types of developers vary quite a lot too. ie. the difference between a deeply focused google back-end engineer vs a broad spectrum small business solutions builder. How do you compare the two??
The coding/programming teachers (academics) I've met don't code or build for a living, hardly the type to be the judge of your ability in your field.
So this will be difficult, especially on a global scale, but I actually like the idea, because I've grown terribly allergic to coding tests!
It REALLY depends on how the test is administered. I don’t know how many times I’ve had other engineers looking over my shoulder while I’m taking the test. Enough times to crack the joke “What you don’t know the answer?” But seriously for a moment, I’ve seen brilliant people freeze the moment they feel people have the opportunity to be judgemental and the person who is giving the test has no idea how to communicate effectively so it results in just an unpleasant experience for everyone.
haha, yes. I think those timed online ones are the worst.
The last one I had (sitting at home) just started, then a notification came through about a webinar with Peter Diamandis starting that I had registered for but forgot about. Absolute panic, trying to listen to him talk about solving worldwide problems whilst trying to remember to put 15 return statements in a javascript function!! uuughh
In the previous companies I've been involved with, new recruits would just be thrown into a small parts of the actual work and they would be free to get into the code at their own time. Absolute beginners (fresh out of college etc.) would be brought up to speed over the course of a few weeks to learn the stack etc.
Wondering if anyone is for a union for people in technology?
I'm in favor of having unions and would love to see the tech industry move to having them as long as they work to making work environments more inclusive and equitable for marginalized folks.
Thank you for writing this up and creating space for discussion!
Idk what is up with the comments here, wildly discouraging. We've got Thatcherites...anti-tax folks....my fave euro dude who thinks jumping straight to socialism (which he doesn't have...in the first place...because democratic socialism != socialism...) is more viable than talking about unions, not realizing that 1. socialism is a Bad Word in the US, 2. socialism won't come about without the working + middle classes connecting on labor issues...
Also 'anti-pattern' guy lmao....
I love the idea of unionizing but uh look at this mess lol y i k e s
There is a lot of disinformation out there about any organization who wants to challenge the status quo. 🤷♂️
That and it reeks of "I got mine"-ism. Still no responses to your point of how do we as a collective empower marginalized/oppressed people in the industry.
I would very much be for it. I am in Europe and frankly I do not agree with what has been written in the comments above, that much is already covered by law.
That is not true. Let's take the blackmail of illegal questions in job interviews. Even if they are illegal, even if discrimination is a well established crime, both in European and US legislation, still employers are asking illegal questions and use discrimination against sex, origin and marital status. Technical interviews that do not have anything to do with the job itself, but are just an humiliation for candidate developers. Companies that are rejecting good developers only because they are older.
Companies that are rejecting good developers only because they do not hold a degree. And some will tell you that you are rejected because you dont hold a CS degree only at the end of all the 5 steps of the recruiting process.
Now, I ask myself: what do all these arbitrary criteria and rejections have to do with INNOVATION? I think on the contrary that exactly these malpractices are skimming off good candidates and prevent innovation.
I would thouroughly support a trade union for developers - it is needed now more than ever. The course of future now is that many developers' jobs are bound in less than 20 years to be replaced by robots, if we let employers do what they do and how they want.
A thousand times yes! This is the only way to hold companies accountable in the way they interact with their workers. And I don't think it's a secret that the power balance between workers and companies is in dis-balance!