Annoying.
Claiming that all non-union companies are inherently operating via "unfair exploitation of its staff" is ridiculous. It's entirely possible for a labor union to go too far and drive a company to become noncompetitive.
These sort of canned answers are empty claptrap and not really fit for an honest discussion.
Whether that's due to constant turnover from poor treatment of their employees, or due to union strikes, doesn't change the statement.
hellojesus said "There is always the chance that the collective action discounts the impact to the business too heavily and ends up driving the company under, making the outcomes worse for everyone."
popalchemist said "If the company's existence depends on the unfair exploitation of its staff, its foreclosure is inevitable and justified"
That response is implying that the only way the business could go under due to unionization is because the business was formerly exploiting its staff. It's not just pro-union, it's outright zealotry that ignores reality.
I see no implication that all failing businesses after unionization is due to exploitation.
Is that the bar we want a corporate environment to meet? No unfair exploitation of anyone ever?
If so, the existing structures sure as shit don't meet it. Why carry water for them?
You cannot replace your entire gamedev team at once without destroying what makes your company, your company. You cannot respond to your entire gamedev team refusing to work other than by replacing them or by getting them to stop striking, either by aggressively union-busting or by negotiating with the union. That is the reason unions work at all.
Funny thing. Pay people fairly and don't abuse them, and they don't strike. If they are striking, I have a lot more suspicion towards management than the workers.
The whole point of the union is to have any power at all and to try to improve their working conditions, not to overpower the giants who rule over them. No one joins a union because they want to put themselves out of a job.
Always follow the money - there's no free lunch. The Union negotiates incremental raises not because it is righteous and just - no, it negotiates incremental raises because the Union wants more revenue.
Sometimes the goals of a Union and it's members align - but often they do not.
Unions get a lot of free positive PR, but in modern times there seems to be more examples of bad-acting Unions than good-acting Unions. Unions have been responsible for businesses failing and massive job-loss, are the source of countless frivolous lawsuits, and in many ways suppress wages by standardizing across organizations and industries instead of allowing natural market-forces to act. Unions have been responsible for stunting the development of a generation of kids during COVID, keeping our ports non-automated and inefficient, driving product cost increases due to bloated staffing requirements, driving jobs overseas, and in some cases preventing people from gaining employment that don't want to be part of a Union.
Unions used to serve a great purpose. We used to have 12-16+ hour workdays, no days off, etc. None of that is true anymore - the great battles have been fought and won, and nobody is going back. The Unions have to find a reason to exist, so propaganda.
Software Engineers are the very last class of workers that need Unions. On average a SE earns a very healthy income and has a very comfortable working environment.
If you believe a Union will substantively benefit your quality of life - you really should just find a new job. As fanciful is it might be, a Union isn't going to 180 your job and make everything great - and now they get a cut of the wages too.
The 8 hour workday is not guaranteed to office workers anymore.
See HN discussion of 996: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45149049
This comment puts it in perspective:
>Yeah, I'm not sure Id Software, backed by their billion dollar parent company ZeniMax Media, who in turn is backed by their parent company Microsoft, has to live in fear of being exploited by the 165 employees who just signed onto a union.
Your comment is inane in the context of the reality of the situation.
Yes, there are scenarios where employees are stripped of agency. E.g a factory owner taking and holding foreign worker's passports. But if you're going to allege that something is preventing these works from accepting competing offers, you have to offer evidence for that claim.
EDIT: I guess you can just downvote, sure, but why not engage?
* Employer-bound health insurance in the US
* Industry blacklists to exclude uppity employees and union members
* Noncompetes and NDAs
* Extremely localized jobs and an ever-shrinking number of larger and larger conglomerates as employers
Benefits are part of an employees compensation package. A competing offer could have even better healthcare than Id.
> Industry blacklists to exclude uppity employees and union members.
This is illegal and the last time SV companies were found doing this the government punished them
Is there any evidence that this is happening to Id employees?
> Noncompetes
Illegal in CA where ID is based. NDAs don't prevent you from working at competitors, only from taking confidential info.
> Extremely localized jobs and an ever-shrinking number of larger and larger conglomerates as employers.
Id is located in the Bay Area, probably the place with the greatest concentration of software jobs in the country if not the world.
If a period of unemployment kicks you off an insurance program that's covering life-essential treatment for a loved one, there is no mechanism of "choosing freely" here; ex-employees don't have the option of covering health care themselves and there are no guarantees that the other employer's health care will cover existing treatments even if the coverage is better in theory.
> This is illegal and the last time SV companies were found doing this the government punished them
Every recruiter has spreadsheets of blacklisted employees, one of the reasons why companies frequently outsource staffing to outsides for plausible deniability.
> Illegal in CA where ID is based. NDAs don't prevent you from working at competitors, only from taking confidential info.
So illegal en CA but legal pretty much everywhere else, once again limiting you if you want to move because COL is too high in California and reducing the pool of real employment alternatives.
> Id is located in the Bay Area, probably the place with the greatest concentration of software jobs in the country if not the world.
Software jobs but not gaming jobs. California suffers from an artificial shortage of affordable housing due to insane tax laws and building restrictions. There's nothing free market about this.
> Every recruiter has spreadsheets of blacklisted employees
If you're going to allege illegal anti-poaching agreements, you ought to provide evidence of those claims.
> So illegal en CA but legal pretty much everywhere else, once again limiting you if you want to move because COL is too high in California and reducing the pool of real employment alternatives.
Actually, I just checked this and in 2024 the FTC banned non competes nationwide.
> Software jobs but not gaming jobs. California suffers from an artificial shortage of affordable housing due to insane tax laws and building restrictions. There's nothing free market about this.
And? Id software developers are free to work non-gaming software jobs. A big part of the reason why game dev jobs offer less renumeration is because people are passionate about games and are willing to take a pay cut to work in the industry.
If an Id employee is not willing to work non-gaming software development jobs that's a restriction imposed by their own decisions, not by their employers.
People in this thread are comparing Id software developers to slavery. The fact that they'll have to go on COBRA in between jobs doesn't make this comparison to slavery any less absurd.
Yes because companies are famous for being highly law-abiding under every circumstance and every major instance of corporate fraud has been identified and properly punished at a criminal basis.
C'mon man, the US is a country where wage theft is 3 times higher than all other formst of theft combined. Informal blacklists are as simple as keeping a notebook in writing and letting people know through hidden WhatsApp channels.
> Actually, I just checked this and in 2024 the FTC banned non competes nationwide.
The rule is vacated by an injunction.
> And? Id software developers are free to work non-gaming software jobs. A big part of the reason why game dev jobs offer less renumeration is because people are passionate about games and are willing to take a pay cut to work in the industry.
I have no idea why you think that a job being desirable and in high demand means that the people who effectively perform the job are somehow less deserving of workers' rights. The entire point behind having workers' rights is that basic job affordances and rights a non-negotiable because we do not allow certain forms undignified work.
Some factories have been caught physically locking employees in the building and not letting them leave. Can I say with certainty that this isn't happening at Id? No, but it's still not valid to baselessly assert that it is happening at Id Technologies because other instances of this behavior have been documented.
The fact that desirable jobs like game dev means employers don't have to compete as hard to attract talent. That's not infringing on game developers' rights. Game developers have the ability to work in jobs other than game dev. If they choose not to pursue those opportunities that's a choice they're making on their own initiative, not an infringement on their rights.
Workers rights like safe working environments, minimum wage, and other laws still apply to game devs.
Maybe they can just start their own company. Well, you can't for the existing players to peer traffic with you if you need heavy network access.
Nobody doubts that employers can curb worker's ability to accept competing offers. The question is whether there's actually any evidence backing up the claim that Id employees aren't free to leave.
The fact you can't understand solidarity is your problem, not theirs.
I'm asking people who are insisting that Id employees are not free to accept competing offers to back up those claims with evidence.
How many of these collusions have not been brought to light?
Can I say for certain that this didn't happen at Id? No, but anyone making that claim ought to actually provide evidence that it happened at Id, not simple point to some other company that engaged in this behavior.
Oh wait... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Quit the gaslighting.
There was a big case with Apple and other Silicon Valley corporations were found to have colluded to not hire employees working for any of the other companies.
And there's some factories in Asia that confiscate foreign worker's passports.
Nobody is claiming that workers' ability to move jobs is never compromised by employees. The question is, is there any evidence to back up that Id employees are in this situation as commenters are claiming in this thread?
And it sure looks like the answer is "no", given that the best people can come up with is point to a decades old no-poaching agreement and speculate that something like that might be happening at Id.
The problem is that all employers have certain common interests, and they are generally more organized and powerful than individual workers, which biases the market status-quo in their favor. The market doesn't fix that.
I suppose only those who lose their jobs because of a merger, or the CEO making poor decisions ought to get the warm and fuzzies because someone on the Internet won't blame them for their own misfortune.
Somewhere on the spectrum between "egalitarian, flat organization Utopia" and "Slavery", one has to draw a line where entities below that line should not exist.
And in general the US has a cost of living problem because the various levels of government keep getting captured by people who want regulations that make costs to go up because they're the ones getting the money. That makes US workers less competitive because of the corruption-induced regulatory costs, which is exactly the opposite of markets working as they should, except insofar as "industries move out of countries with high corruption and inefficient laws" is supposed to apply pressure to countries to get more efficient rules.
Perhaps we need to complete the thought here: was it the unions or executives that decided to offshore manufacturing? If the counterargument that unions are to blame for offshoring by "artificially" increasing the cost of labor, and should have competed with Chinese labor on price and they got their just deserts: then why are executives now (successfully) lobbying for protectionism against Chinese manufacturers? Why can't capital handle the type of rugged capitalism they inflict on American workers? If chinese goods could be ported as easily and cheaply into America and American labor was ported to China, there'd be blood on the floor.
Neither. It was consumers, who prefer lower prices.
> why are executives now (successfully) lobbying for protectionism against Chinese manufacturers?
Because they were fools who thought they could offshore the factory work but not the management work.
> If chinese goods could be ported as easily and cheaply into America and American labor was ported to China
This is literally what has already happened.
The actual solution is for the US to do something about high domestic costs, especially housing and medicine, which are the things keeping US workers from being globally competitive.
I agree, we should return to Adam Smith style capitalism/markets, with his strong promotion of regulation against monopolies, corruption, and rent-seeking
You have to realize that there are people who call themselves "libertarians" who are actually plutocrats, just like there are plutocrats who call themselves "progressives", because people wouldn't agree with them if they would plainly state their actual goals. Whereas pretending to be the people who want to take you down serves the dual purposes of stealing the support of their base for your corruption and then undermining the support for the people who actually want to fix it once other people see what you're doing under their banner.
What are you talking about? Multiple people were convicted over the Enron scandal, including some serious prison terms.
I am pointing out that some commenters here are grading Unions and CEOs on different curves on the issue of negative outcomes, and the alleged union bogeyman is a frequent occurrence at ununionized organizations.
> Multiple people were convicted over the Enron scandal, including some serious prison terms.
That is great, and should have been a deterrent for more ruinous shenanigans. Which CEOs got arrested for the subprime mortgage heists that triggered the 2008 GFC? The GFC made Enron look like jaywalking, I'm sure dozens of executive received life sentences and entire banks shuttered for their malfeasance and lack of internal controls. Right?
There's plenty of examples of business owners driving a company into the ground to personally enrich themselves.
It goes both ways. There are plenty of nations with strong unions throughout. In the US some work is primarily done by unions (such as trade work).
The fact that someone can pull up an example where a union caused a business to go under doesn't make me think "we should eliminate unions". It doesn't even make me think "We should limit union negotiation powers" primarily because unions rights have been curtailed since the Reagan era.
If you wanted to convince me to get rid of unions, you'd do it by setting up robust workers rights nationally which unions provide.
That's the point. We should prevent management from destroying productive companies and prevent unions from doing it, instead of saying "what about those other guys" to justify the bad behavior of either of them.
> In the US some work is primarily done by unions (such as trade work).
You're referring to some of the least efficient industries in the US with high levels of regulatory capture. The fact that there is no test-based path to occupational licensing in many trades, only multi-year "apprenticeship" (i.e. permission from an incumbent), is one of the big reasons construction costs so much, people can't afford housing and government construction projects consistently blow the budget.
> If you wanted to convince me to get rid of unions, you'd do it by setting up robust workers rights nationally which unions provide.
Most "worker protections" are nothing better than highly inefficient alternatives to unemployment insurance. If you have competitive markets then you don't need regulatory protections because companies are subject to competitive pressure. If you don't have competitive markets then you're unconditionally screwed and the first thing you need is to fix that.
Im not justifying anyone, I'm suggesting a pragmatic, imperfect solution to a clear power imbalance. There's only one way to treat a counterpart who repeatedly defects on the iterated prisoners dilemma, and its not waiting for them to unilaterally start cooperating.
Except that there isn't only one way, there are two. The first is that you keep playing with the defector and start defecting yourself, hoping that they unilaterally start cooperating. The second is that you quit playing with the defector and go play with someone else. And which one of those is likely to work out better for you?
I'll agree to that. But I'd point out that it's far more the case that management destroys a business, not a union. The US has fairly weak union protections and few unions at the moment. The place where change needs to happen is in management. But also we need to start talking about what it means for a business to be productive.
> You're referring to some of the least efficient
Least efficient how? Because it's expensive?
> high levels of regulatory capture.
No. Regulatory capture is when a business keeps out competitors through hard to fulfill regulations. It's not when the standard for employees is high making it hard for new employees to enter the market. The acid test for regulatory capture is "is there an oligopoly here" and the answer for trade work is a clear "no". There's a billion different companies in any given city that do trade work.
> The fact that there is no test-based path to occupational licensing in many trades, only multi-year "apprenticeship"
For very good reason. Tradework done poorly gets people killed. Taking a one time test is a very bad way to ensure that quality is high. There's a reason places without unions also use the apprenticeship method of licensing (doctors for example).
> If you have competitive markets then you don't need regulatory protections because companies are subject to competitive pressure.
That's wishful thinking assuming that a competitive market can't also be exclusive, hard to enter, or oversaturated. There are things that naturally can't be competitive, usually involving high levels of skill or knowledge. For example, microchip fabrication. It's simply too expensive to buy the equipment to make a computer chip and that can't be solved by anti-trust enforcement.
I didn't say that collective ruin was a result of unionism, only that that you appeared to be trying illustrate a point by outlining a broad spectrum of outcomes, but IMO you forgot one common outcome of forced collectivization. Where it belongs on that spectrum can be debated but that it's a common outcome cannot be.
Meanwhile unions in a consolidated market have the perverse incentive to sustain the monopoly because then the union is extracting a portion of the monopoly rents the corporation is squeezing out of consumers at the expense of the 99% of workers who don't work for that specific company. Which is why consolidated markets need not unions but antitrust enforcement.
A strong market economy is orthogonal to the treatment of workers. For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery. Same for islands like Jamaica.
The ideal is government regulation ensuring worker rights. Barring that, unions fill the role. Unions exist to fill a void created by a low regulation market. They are the libertarian solution.
If one company is exploiting their workers in a competitive market, what prevents those workers from going to work for any of the other companies?
> For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery.
Slavery is a government regulation that says that if someone pays a stranger money then you have to do work you never agreed to do. Markets are the thing where you only have to do something if you agreed to do it.
> They are the libertarian solution.
They're an attempt to monopolize the labor market in an industry. When unsuccessful they're useless because they have no bargaining power, when successful they're an abusive monopolist extracting undue rents from that industry's customers.
Depends, is there a labor shortage or a surplus? It might be cheaper for a company to train a replacement than it is to treat employees better. If there's a labor surplus, then the employer has a lot of power of the situation.
> Slavery is a government regulation that says that if someone pays a stranger money then you have to do work you never agreed to do.
Nope. In fact, slavery was contract/property law. There wasn't a government regulation or statute that established or regulated it. That was part of the problem. Slavery was the ultimate in libertarian ideology because it recognized that through whatever means, individuals could end up the property of other individuals. It further recognized children as the property of their parents (and thus property of the slave owners).
You can consider indentured servants, for example. Someone willingly signs themselves into slavery to pay off the debt (usually the boat ride to america). Slavery was a natural extension of that concept.
The only role the government served in this situation was enforcing the slave contracts.
> They're an attempt to monopolize the labor market in an industry.
That's not a refutation. Libertarian ideology (particularly the free market form) has no problems with a monopoly.
I do, which is why I think government regulations and actions to break up monopolies is a good thing.
But in a market without government protection for workers, unions forming a labor monopoly is the only solution which can counteract the inherent power imbalance between employer and employee.
I'd not classify them as "abusive" because far more people benefit from strong employee protections than the people harmed by those protections. The ultimate harm is it makes businesses less profitable.
That determines things like wages. It doesn't allow companies to do things like cause $1000 in damage to you in order to save $10, because then they'd have to pay you $1000 more than the company that isn't doing that or you'd still go work there instead.
Also, if there is a labor surplus then how is a union going to do any good? The company would just let them go on strike and hire replacements.
> In fact, slavery was contract/property law.
That seems to have the word "law" in it.
> It further recognized children as the property of their parents (and thus property of the slave owners).
Which is obviously not something the child consented to.
> You can consider indentured servants, for example. Someone willingly signs themselves into slavery to pay off the debt (usually the boat ride to america).
There are arguments to be made against this, but it's significantly more defensible than doing it without consent. Because then who is going to do it? And how is it really different than e.g. non-dischargeable student loans, a thing the government still does?
> The only role the government served in this situation was enforcing the slave contracts.
The only role the government serves in a contract to form a cartel is enforcing the contract too, which is why there are contracts the government shouldn't enforce.
> Libertarian ideology (particularly the free market form) has no problems with a monopoly.
Libertarian ideology assumes that monopolies form as a result of government rules. It obviously can't allow for unrestricted anti-competitive contracts because then someone with a monopoly on any necessity could force everyone into a contract to form a dictatorial government, which is anathema to the entire ideology. But contract law is the government. A government that didn't enforce contracts at all and only enforced laws against violence would be perfectly consistent with it, whereas a government that enforces contracts you never agreed to or that you were forced to sign under duress would not.
> But in a market without unions and government protection for workers, unions forming a labor monopoly is the only solution which can counteract the inherent power imbalance between employer and employee.
How is there an inherent power imbalance in a competitive market? They can choose a different employee and you can choose a different employer.
> I'd not classify them as "abusive" because far more people benefit from strong employee protections than the people harmed by those protections. The ultimate harm is it makes businesses less profitable.
The ultimate harm is that it makes the industry's products worse or more expensive to customers, or increases market consolidation if a union destroys a company in an industry with high barriers to entry and thereby causes there to be fewer of them.
How a worker is treated is part of wages. It has a very real impact on the jobs people take. If you are, for example expected to work 60h weeks vs 40h weeks you take the 60h company if nobody else is hiring.
> Also, if there is a labor surplus then how is a union going to do any good? The company would just let them go on strike and hire replacements.
Scabs crossing picket lines have a real hard time. And, historically, unions have banded together to boycott employers who hire scabs.
> That seems to have the word "law" in it.
Law isn't the same thing as a regulation. Anyone that proposes a "free market" is looking at a market determined by contract law.
Or do you think there's some other way to operate a market that doesn't ultimately need a 3rd party to take disputes to?
> which is why there are contracts the government shouldn't enforce.
I agree. My points were more digs at free market absolutism.
> Libertarian ideology assumes that monopolies form as a result of government rules.
No it doesn't. That's silly. You can read up on any libertarian thinker and they'll all happily argue that monopolies actually aren't bad things. A business that can capture a market through scale efficiencies will always be argued as a good thing from the libertarian perspective.
> could force everyone into a contract to form a dictatorial government, which is anathema to the entire ideology.
I agree with your conclusion, but disagree with how you assess it as applying to libertarianism. A fundamental of anarchist-capitalist libertarian thinking is that the only role of government is contract enforcement. They see no problem with a private entity ending up with a monopoly of force so long as everyone agrees to the contracts they enter. That's why you can read about libertarians that support the notion of a company having it's own militia.
I mean, heck, the entire point of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" was how government fails and how society would be much better off if all the smart people got together and formed their own private government in the wilderness (But don't call it government, call it a community organization or whatever). Ironically enough, the main actions of the protagonists was doing a general strike.
> How is there an inherent power imbalance in a competitive market?
As explained earlier, a market can be competitive with either a labor surplus or a labor shortage.
And even with a labor shortage, businesses can collude to undermine worker rights. It becomes harder with a wide market to do that, but not impossible. Real pages is such an example of a pretty wide and competitive market colluding to raise rent prices outside of market forces.
You can't just "go to a different employer" if they all treat employees the same way.
There's also simply a cost in switching jobs. It takes time to search for a new job and with an abusive employer that maybe hard to come by. For example, how do you do a job interview if your employer demands you are there from 9-5 every weekday?
That's the imbalance.
> The ultimate harm is that it makes the industry's products worse
Actually no. You can look up the reasons unions strike and it might surprise you to know it's not always about just getting more money for the union members.
For example, the USC [1] has done strikes specifically because medical facilities are under-staffing on nurses. They want more nurses to improve patient safety.
Money is a part of union negotiations, for sure, but often it's also just about making sure union members aren't overworked.
[1] https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/usc-nurses-hold-t...
The "if nobody else is hiring" is the point. That's the thing that happens when you don't have a competitive market, and correspondingly don't have a lot of different employers to choose from.
There is always work to do for the right price and if there is a surplus of labor and competitive markets then it will tend to just make things cost less, which mitigates the lower pay.
> Scabs crossing picket lines have a real hard time.
It sounds like you're defending intimidation tactics.
> And, historically, unions have banded together to boycott employers who hire scabs.
Which is the thing where they really start acting like an abusive monopoly.
> Or do you think there's some other way to operate a market that doesn't ultimately need a 3rd party to take disputes to?
There are plenty of transactions where you're not worried about disputes. You hand money to the vendor, you get a sandwich, if you don't like the sandwich you're not going to sue them but they don't get any more of your money, the end. Transactions that don't all take place at once can use a private third party escrow service with a reputation to uphold etc.
The ability to form contracts enforced by the government is typically more efficient than some of these things, but if you had to go without it you could make it happen.
> A fundamental of anarchist-capitalist libertarian thinking is that the only role of government is contract enforcement. They see no problem with a private entity ending up with a monopoly of force so long as everyone agrees to the contracts they enter. That's why you can read about libertarians that support the notion of a company having it's own militia
This is the thing where you find the guy who defends Stalin and use it impugn someone who wants to ban leaded gasoline because they both support having the government do things. Extremists are a dull minority and primarily useful to their own opponents when they don't want to contend with a more reasonable version of the argument.
> And even with a labor shortage, businesses can collude to undermine worker rights.
But then you're back to an uncompetitive market. Collusion is anti-competitive and an anti-trust violation.
> Real pages is such an example of a pretty wide and competitive market colluding to raise rent prices outside of market forces.
And there isn't a lot of evidence that their attempt was even successful, rather than just happening concurrently with events that caused rents to increase for independent reasons.
Of course, that doesn't mean that their attempt was lawful either. Attempting to monopolize a market is an anti-trust violation even if you fail at it.
> You can't just "go to a different employer" if they all treat employees the same way.
When there are a thousand of them, they won't all be the same.
> There's also simply a cost in switching jobs. It takes time to search for a new job and with an abusive employer that maybe hard to come by. For example, how do you do a job interview if your employer demands you are there from 9-5 every weekday?
There is also a cost to replace an employee. You have to find someone new, train them, take the risk that they turn out to be lazy or adversarial etc.
Meanwhile there are many jobs that will hire someone immediately with no qualifications, because they have low pay. So if your existing job sucks that much then you quit immediately and take one of those while searching for a better one. Also, in a market with many employers there would be employers that will do interviews after hours.
> For example, the USC [1] has done strikes specifically because medical facilities are under-staffing on nurses. They want more nurses to improve patient safety.
They want more nurses to reduce the workload on nurses and argue patient safety because it's harder to refute. But then they simultaneously lobby for occupational licensing and similar rules that limit the supply of medical professionals, which does the opposite, which is why there is a shortage of doctors and nurses to begin with.
Meanwhile healthcare is one of the industries with the most regulatory capture and that does everything to make sure there isn't a competitive market, so it's not a great example of what happens when there is.
This still sounds like an improvement over the American consolidated market status quo, where the companies and shareholders retain more of the monopoly rents.
Antitrust enforcement would be great, but absent an 1880s-1910s level push, isn't going to happen.
So why not improve things in the meantime?
Let's do that then.
> This still sounds like an improvement over the American consolidated market status quo, where the companies and shareholders retain more of the monopoly rents.
Except that you then get the union lobbying to sustain the monopoly instead of eliminate it, which makes it even harder to do the thing that actually needs to be done.
The last time that happened was a pre-globalized world, multiple decades of building pressure (including the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act), and the youngest US president to ever assume office (Teddy Roosevelt).
That's a confluence of events I'm not betting on naturally replicating.
Step 1 would be passing an update to the Sherman Act through Congress that would survive the current Supreme Court.
The nice thing about antitrust laws is that they're right in the core of the interstate commerce clause, so it's a real stretch to find them unconstitutional and in practice that hasn't been what has happened. Instead, because the Sherman Act is extremely broad but not very detailed, they've just been narrowly interpreting it. Which wouldn't work if you would pass something that explicitly spelled out some of the things. Like just go make a list of all the existing antitrust cases where something bad was found not to be a violation and make a line in the new law that explicitly calls out that one as "yes it is". Which deletes all the precedents anyone could use to claim that their bad behavior is allowed, since Congress just explicitly said that it isn't.
Another great improvement would be to allow anyone to sue for antitrust violations instead of requiring the government prosecutor to do it.
It would also help to get some bipartisanship happening. The current Court has a conservative majority but you only need to convince two out of six, and some of them are more partisan than others, which actually gives you two ways to win. One, you make a good argument and convince the reasonable ones. Two, you stir up the conservative base against some California corporations. Probably easier to do the next time there is a Democratic administration because then they'll start kowtowing to the new administration instead of Trump and thereby anger the conservatives again.
A healthy market would allow voluntary decisions by both parties. It would allow management to choose whether they want to negotiate with a collective broker, and it would allow workers to choose whether they want to find employment congruent with their preferences to either self negotiate or hire a third party.
Ask yourself: Why is a paycheck now consider socialist re-distribution of wealth.
Could it be because literally lives are cheap.
Comparing software development jobs in the modern United States to slavery is quite fanciful.
Until the companies start colluding to suppress your wages.
Regardless, the government cracked down on this behavior (which affected 8 companies) and it stopped in 20009 as per your link.
Hollywood unions were a sticking point. In 2022 and 2023, following the lead of Netflix and Amazon, most of those jobs moved from the US to Europe and Asia.
Atlanta, which was booming for nearly two decades, which had built dozens of $500M class-A film production studios, is suddenly almost entirely vacant. We went from doing almost all of Marvel and Netflix to being a dead zone. We're at 20% of past volume, if that.
LA was evacuated of work even more precipitously.
It's all in Ireland, the UK, Eastern Europe, and Asia now.
Gaming is next. The Saudis and Chinese are chomping at the bit.
edit: fixed the idiom, thanks frmersdog
The bank simply can't lay off people at all without drawing up the plan together with the unions.
Ironically, China has also proven that you can't easily import expertise. At best, you can "steal" it over a long period of being the current industrial center's gopher.
Amazon, Netflix, et al. flew domestic crews to Europe to train their crews how to work. This wasn't unusual, because a lot of movies filmed on-location overseas. Nobody questions that. Par for the course.
Except they trained local crews how to do everything - they trained their replacements in person. And now there are no US domestic crew flights to Europe and Asia.
Chomping is also correct enough today, descriptivistically speaking.
Wow, quite the decision.
In fact the crazy politics right now are largely a consequence of that: with all the factory jobs and similar jobs that were lost, the idea was that “the market” would somehow “correct” and all those people would get different, hopefully better jobs. But that didn’t happen, because it’s all an ideological fiction, right up there with the idea of trickle down economics.
But suddenly, when it’s about workers collectively standing up for their rights against the one-sided power of enormously powerful corporations, “you would have to be an enormous asshole”? There’s definitely an enormous asshole somewhere in this picture.
Like with full time employed Walmart employees that qualify as homeless. Are they happy because they have a job, since poor old Walmart might go under if they were forced to pay a real salary?
It's just a market reaching equilibrium. It's always weird how employees are forever to be expected to be at the mercy of market forces much greater than they are, while employers have to be shielded from them.
It's not a market, at all. It's only possible because of federal law that prevents a business from firing employees for unionizing. If it were a market, the business would have to choose to keep unionzed workers voluntarily. The fact that they don't means it's more like the business being held hostage.
The equivalent would be employees being required by law to stay at a company they don't want to work for. Essentially indentured servitude.
An employer can't fire people for unionizing, but there's no law that requires them to accept a union's negotiating demands... Or prevents them from bringing in scabs if the union chooses to strike without pay.
The existence of a union by itself doesn't do anything.
The only power that a union actually has is not showing up to work. And when the union doesn't show up to work, the employer is free to hire someone else to do the work. It's wild that you're comparing people not showing up to work to 'the employer being held hostage'.
It is of course possible for an employer to treat employees very poorly and arguably exploit them. But it is also possible for employers to lose money for years such that employees are effectively exploiting the employer.
I can imagine unions being a great force of good in the world, but whether they are or are not is largely down to how they behave, just like individuals, corporations and other organizations & institutions.
A union that bargains collectively for it's members sounds very straightforward and logical.
A union like the NYC hotel union that actively lobbies for fewer hotels feels insane.
The rest tends to hide behind culture and opportunity. Unpaid overtime framed as dedication, scope creep framed as growth, on-call expectations framed as ownership, understaffing framed as efficiency. You might find these game developers being abused by a few or all of these examples.
Exploitive companies can borrow against your pride, your fear of falling behind, and your desire to be seen as competent until your baseline becomes always available.
There are lots of outcomes where having the wages the company can profitably offer are far better than having zero wages.
I see this low IQ argument template everywhere now: simply declare your opinion a "basic human right" and then declare anyone with a different opinion unworthy of engagement because they are "against human rights". It's impossible to engage with in good faith.
Like sweatshops for example. The idea that getting anything at all is far better than getting nothing is not new or compelling. It's exactly that kind of race to the bottom mentality where workers are expected to shut up and take whatever scraps their masters give them that causes labor movements to rise up and start demanding better.
We have spent most the last 50 years undoing all of the checks on corporate power that were enacted in the first half of the 20th century. There were literal pitched battles that happened when workers demanded their rights. Here's hoping the transition this time will be less painful (and actually gets repeated at all).
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.
Unions are subject to the constraints of operations. LTL is a very debt-heavy industry, and yellow pushed the envelop too far. But the union could have tried to negotiate a contract contingent on operating costs and debt load. They didn't. Instead they chose their line and then striked until the company went under.
Maybe not the best example, but it was the one on my mind.
The company blamed the collapse on their actions, different things.
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.
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...
In professional sports, the player's union helps raise athlete salaries and improve working conditions and that does ultimately come out of the owner's pockets.
And if you think this doesn't matter for game programmers, look at how many overworked people in the past few years have gotten in car crashes while driving home. Fatigue kills.
The blog: (a long rant)
https://medium.com/@mickgordon/my-full-statement-regarding-d...
Was he under coercion?
It's probably the worst time to do it.
I've only seen unions work well in the long-run with government jobs. The USPS is a good example. Mostly because you really can't fire the workers and the main entity won't ever go out of business because of government bailouts.
Cue Concorde.
If you spend half a billion, to make a game that's five multiplayer maps, fail to do any market research, to find out that the part of your audience that isn't indifferent to your game actively hates it, playing the role of innocent victim subject to the whims of evil studio execs, is somewhat unproductive.
When they're up and running, workers will still be unionized under the same SAG-AFTRA as workers in Hollywood are.
But is this actually the case here?
Unfortunately, the AAA industry is not in a good spot right now, I remember there being an article that there was not a single AAA game at some point in the Steam Best Sellers list.
id and Bethesda isn't doing quite so badly, but their most recent games have been meh.
When the labor market gets competitive, you start to see long probationary periods, two-tier pay and benefit scales, hiring people on as casuals instead of permanent members, and other bargaining concessions that end up favoring some union members over others. I know some unions over the last few years have managed to fight against two-tier systems, but if there's any sort of serious economic downturn I'd expect them to become commonplace again.
I'm curious to see if they can come up with a way to organize that works for everyone, or if it'll end up as something like the Longshoreman's union: a fantastic deal, provided you won the lottery to get in and then stuck around long enough to be a permanent member.
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.
Automotive plants have large factories, but when the primary assets are intangible intellectual property, I don’t understand how much power a union really has.
That’s why they’re mostly autoworkers or longshoremen and whatnot an not professionals, outside a few niches motivated by ideology.
It sucks both for you and the company if they have to replace you.
In contrast, if you work building SaaS apps on top of k8s, you can both transfer your skills easily, and the company can replace you easier.
It could go both ways, but in practice it usually turns out that if your skills are transferable you make more money.
This thing also popped up in the gaming industry, with Unreal becoming popular, and people using it making much more and jumping between projects, because their skills are transferable.
This turns out to be a lot harder in practice than in theory.
(Mind you, that very individualism is why they're not already unionized)
Gamers are very passionate about their games and the companies behind them. They are also very anti-AI, pro consumer rights, and pro unions. At least the vocal majority of gamers, such as on /r/games, which is where a good portion of gaming journalists get their takes.
It would be the end of id Software from a PR standpoint if they fired union developers responsible for their beloved titles, specifically the recent DOOM titles. The bad PR would also extend to ZeniMax, Bethesda, and Microsoft.
That said, gamers are also the worst at voting with their wallet. Despite all the bad union PR Rockstar North is receiving, pretty much everyone in support of the fired employees will probably still end up buying GTA6 because of FOMO and hype.
From the article, remote work seems to be the crux of the issue - I do think devs should get it but the pity party they hold for themselves is kinda tone deaf imo
I also would like to see better 'tech' for tech unions to organize, vote on priorities, share grievances, elect representatives, etc.. Ideally moving to a fixed fee vs a % of compensation. It shouldn't require millions of dollars in overhead to organize.
1) for people that aren't in a union, make labor lawyers easy to use. there could be an app used to walk you through gathering evidence about various workplace violations (osha/safety stuff, wage theft, etc) and then hook you up with lawyers in a two-sided marketplace. workers would get easy represenation, lawyers would get a stream of clients that show up with a nicely formatted bundle of evidence. it could even work to find conneted cases could get bundled into class actions.
2) when everybody worked in the same office/shop floor, you could easily commiserate and start discussions about unionization and collective action. if you're an app-mediated gig-worker (uber drivers, door-dashers, etc) you don't know how to connect with your coworkers. there needs to be a social platform where people would be able to make these connections. to do this, you'd need a way to verify that users are actual employees and put in various protections to make sure management isn't spying on them.
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.
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.
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.
An econ 101 observation: unions contribute to structural unemployment: Keeping wages above market-clearing levels, and by preventing wage adjustment.
Through collective bargaining, unions can negotiate wages that are higher than what the market would naturally set. This can lead to the cost of labor being too high for some employers, resulting in fewer jobs. Similarly, unions can prevent wages from adjusting to market conditions.
So for the common good, individuals may go without a job.
Econ 101 observations are utterly useless without the specific context in which they're made. This is like talking about spherical cows in a vacuum in the context of aerodynamics.
In the specific case of unions, they always forget to mention that a higher proportion of a company's income going to salaries generally means increased consumer spending for workers, which spurs other kinds of industry and services that may mean a net benefit for the global economy.
Of course second and third-order effects are not really talked about in Econ 101.
Do you apply the same argument for employers? Companies contribute to low wages. By collectively bargaining with employees (e.g. hiring at the local grocery store is centralized, you can't go around to all the individual managers and start a bidding war) they can negotiate wages that are lower than what the market would naturally set.
No single union is 1:1 alike.
When I had a family member get a job as a local grocery store bagger, then job stipulated he HAD to join the union and give his dues out of paycheck within 1 month or he would be fired from his job.
He quit. He was a 15yrold teenager just trying ro have an after school job and he got squeezed.
Unions are not good. Unions are not bad. Unions are.
I am eager to see how this specific union engages with the game development industry.
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."
For what it’s worth, I think it should be very easy to become an American citizen. I think these companies benefit from that not being the case. They’d call ICE on native-born citizens for trying to unionize if they could.
Here's the link to the union organizing page.[2] No draft union contract for Id, though.
Interestingly, this is an industrial ("wall to wall") union, rather than a craft union such as The Animation Guild. IATSE Local 839, in Hollywood. TAG only represents specific jobs, mostly animation artists.
A key point in TAG contracts is how "crunch time" is handled. It's allowed, but overtime rates go way, way up as the hours go up. This is standard procedure in Hollywood. Some terms from TAG's standard contract:
All time worked in excess of eight (8) hours per day or forty (40) hours per week shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification. Time worked on the employee's sixth workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification. Time worked on the employee's seventh workday of the workweek shall be paid at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification. All time worked in excess of fourteen (14) consecutive hours (including meal periods) from the time of reporting to work shall be Golden Hours and shall be paid at two (2) times the applicable hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification.[3]
This encourages management to schedule realistically. The Id/CWA deal isn't far enough along for those terms to be visible yet. But such terms are common in CWA contracts.
[1] https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/video-game-developers-te...
[3] https://animationguild.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2024-2...
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.
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.
If you don't like it, then quit. No one is forcing you to work for Id Software.
I fear the time for fixing this is passing fast. Its because within a decade AI will have enough of labor displacement that labor wont have any negotiating leverage against capital. If this happens with union, so be it.
You are 100% a software engineer lol
This sounds to me like "I don't want memory protection, what I really want is for my computer to solidly enforce common sense memory barriers", or "I don't want defense attorneys, what I really want is courts to provide common sense advocacy for defendants". Somebody has to do the work, and you're naming the component of the system which provides the features you want.
The universe maximizes entropy, not common sense. The tech industry doesn't want to give an inch for the same reason a dropped object falls to earth: there is no force suggesting it do anything else.
thinkingemote•5h ago
Perhaps generally the ideals the new unions are advocating for are different than traditional ones?
wrs•4h ago
But given the continual decrease in job stability in tech, perhaps we’re headed toward more of a Hollywood model, where the skilled workers are nearly all free-lance and project-based, and have powerful unions with such provisions industry-wide.
palmotea•4h ago
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.
mrsilencedogood•4h ago
Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.
I still suspect part of the reason Epic sold them is to ninja-bust the union (or at least get it out of the way).
palmotea•4h ago
I don't know.
> Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.
That seems like something that should be illegal, if it's not already. It seems like a paper maneuver.
It should probably be expected that employers will play dirty, which is one of the reasons why I think the unions need to be hyper-focused on worker and workplace issues to the exclusion of all else.
closewith•4h ago
sallveburrpi•3h ago
Edit: last news i see on their mastodon are from April 2024 and seems they negotiated some severance pay for the laid off workers and that it; so I guess the union busting was successful?
danaris•4h ago
So...should it pick and choose which kinds of workers to represent the interests of?
Or should it fight for the interests of all the workers?
Because that's really the choice it has to make: do you fight for the interests of disabled workers, and female workers, and trans workers, and black workers, and immigrant workers? Or do you only fight for the interests of white male workers?
Either choice is a political choice.
You cannot avoid politics when one side of the political aisle has declared that the validity and ability to exist in public life of certain categories of people is against their agenda.
Izikiel43•3h ago
You fight for the interests of tech workers in this case, or truckers in a truckers union, so on and so forth.
Why are americans so obsessed to make everything about race?
If a union member is facing discrimination at work, get them a lawyer for it.
danaris•3h ago
Because the political party currently in power in our country is an actual, literal, (Christian) White Supremacist party.
They are deliberately rounding up people that look like they might be Hispanic (and various other non-white ethnicities), declaring them to be illegal immigrants regardless of their actual status, and deporting them or putting them in camps.
heavyset_go•1h ago
As part of the policy of the current administration, the EEOC has dropped all cases related to LGBT discrimination in the hiring and the workplace[1] and is refusing to take new cases.
If you focused any effort on addressing that, I suspect someone who isn't even in the union would come out of the woodwork to say "that union shouldn't be addressing policy like that, it's divisive and what about everyone else?"
Union workers' rights and interests are impacted by policy that discriminates, pretending that isn't so doesn't get us anywhere.
[1] https://www.equalrights.org/news/eeocs-decision-to-drop-lgbt...
Izikiel43•1h ago
Also, title ix still exists, civil court should take the case.
palmotea•3m ago
So? Not every organization has to take on every issue. And the idea that they must has been enormously damaging and kept us from having a lot of nice things.
tehjoker•4h ago
Unions should do political education and work with issue based, socialist organizations, and invite speakers to facilitate discussions, while building consensus around what needs to be done in the workplace and fighting on behalf of their fellow workers ferociously.
palmotea•4h ago
I should clarify: I totally agree with being "political" in that area. The stuff I'm thinking about are things like Gaza, BLM, etc. They may be very worthy causes, but there's controversy about them too, and they don't really seem to be in-scope for a union.
tehjoker•3h ago
U.S. and western unions generally have been very conservative and "business unions" since the anti-communist counterattacks after WW2. This is because there has been a constant counterinsurgency tactic against our leadership involving cooptation, sidelining, and even assassination. The wealthy want to rule unopposed and for you to just vote for one of their pre-selected candidates in elections.
Since you mentioned Gaza, an issue dear to my heart (not that BLM isn't, but for brevity I'll talk about the movement that is highlighted right now), let me give an example that illustrates how essential unions are. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft are supplying information technology and AI systems to the occupation and are making bank doing it. Who is going to stop them? The people best positioned to do so are their workers.
The most essential way to help Gaza is to enforce sanctions, halting economic activity with Israeli companies, and most importantly stopping the transfer of all military materials to Israel, even so called "defensive" weapons like Iron Dome that allow the occupation to perform the genocide without repercussions. In Italy, huge strikes and protests forced the openly fascist PM that praised Mussolini to send a warship to aid the Global Samud Flotilla which aimed to break the siege on Gaza. Dock workers in Italy refused to service ships bound for Israel with weapons, and got the (again openly fascist) PM to enforce a weapons embargo.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/italy-general-strike...
Assert your right to rule this global society in the interests of humanity in concert with your brothers and sister workers around the world.
palmotea•3h ago
But the primary job of a union is to represent its workers in the workplace, not to do any particular political thing that workers are "best positioned to do." Given the weak position unions are already in in the US, it's not the time to, say, alienate the fraction of the workforce who supports Israel from the union. You need those guys to vote to get the union certified, which is already a difficult uphill battle without their alienation.
The union and its organizers need to be able to say no, and be ruthlessly prioritize and be pragmatic. If they can't, I think their chances of accomplishing anything are slim.
kmeisthax•3h ago
OK, that's a contrived scenario. But even outside of that scenario, social oppression is downstream of worker oppression. Cops aren't shooting black people because it's their kink, they're doing it to enforce the same social order that keeps your workers down. The next time the union strikes, those same cops are going to be there to break the picket line. Police are always the enemy of labor, and thus keeping the police in check is in-scope to a union's political activities.
[0] Ala https://xkcd.com/545/
palmotea•3h ago
There's nothing about representing Palestinian in a workplace that means you have to take an official position on Gaza or even spend any time talking about it. Or any analogous thing for a member of any group.
> OK, that's a contrived scenario. But even outside of that scenario, social oppression is downstream of worker oppression. Cops aren't shooting black people because it's their kink, they're doing it to enforce the same social order that keeps your workers down. The next time the union strikes, those same cops are going to be there to break the picket line. Police are always the enemy of labor, and thus keeping the police in check is in-scope to a union's political activities.
But the problem is scope creep undermines the organization. All of what you said may be true, but Tech Union X isn't going to solve those problems and getting involved with them will make Tech Union X less effective at the things it can do.
Tech unions aren't even off the ground and unions generally are weakened and getting weaker, this is not a time to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
nitwit005•4h ago
There's not really an equivalent with most service industries. Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running.
mrsilencedogood•4h ago
Can you tell me where you work, and are you hiring???
natebc•4h ago
JohnMakin•4h ago
esseph•4h ago
websiteapi•4h ago
lawlessone•4h ago
And, for now at least, advertisers on twitter can't sell products to these bots. So lost money.
johannes1234321•4h ago
Also initially they had a lot of breakage.
websiteapi•4h ago
lesuorac•3h ago
paxys•4h ago
websiteapi•4h ago
fwip•3h ago
If the factory workers don't show up for work, your factory's output immediately drops to 0%. If none of your software engineers show up, most of your company's code will continue to run, some of it in a degraded state, for a while. (How much depends on your sub-industry, and how much you're outsourcing to AWS). And if you can get 5% of your workers to show up, you might be able to handle 90% of the on-call load.
EliRivers•3h ago
I think the record single instance uptime on a customer site was most of a decade, running a TV station.
smileson2•3h ago
Workaccount2•3h ago
That collapse didn't happen.
heavyset_go•1h ago
Xss3•4h ago
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™.
venturecruelty•4h ago
CodingJeebus•4h ago
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.
strifey•4h ago
PagerDuty wouldn't exist if this were true.
mempko•4h ago
paxys•4h ago
themafia•4h ago
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
dragonwriter•4h ago
That's true federally, too, but the CA salary threshold is much higher.
kg•3h ago
bufordtwain•3h ago
digitalsushi•3h ago
doctorpangloss•4h ago
You: That's ridiculous! We need one universal union that covers everyone's needs. Yeah!
Situation: There are 15 competing unions.
fwip•4h ago
mrweasel•4h ago
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.
collinmcnulty•4h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Workers_of_Amer...
dragonwriter•1h ago
dragonwriter•4h ago
The article here mentions the umbrella union that this effort was associated with, Communications Workers of America (which itself is part of AFL-CIO.)
IPFTE, I think, also organizes software developers along with other professional and technical workers, and SEIU has a lot in the public and nonprofit sectors.