Waay to go. UNIONIZE OR PERISH!
I can tell it’s too early, I read that twice as “unionize on prem!”
It’s not too early. In fact, the more you wait, the more they’ll find reasons and tools to make you an obedient slave.
Tech has changed and I am glad people are starting to realize it too.
No industry in the history of industry has ever wanted a union.
You get people pushing for unions because you deserve unions.
The tech industry is such a shitshow right now they deserve unions.
Hard agree. Every other day a big tech firm will conduct sweeping layoffs of thousands or tens of thousands of employees. These companies are not on the verge of bankrupcy.
The other thing is the management and boards of tech companies are incredibly incestuous. Your board is made up the boards of everyone else, they’re all CEOs competing for the same workers.
You’ve got two or three big investment firms that run the boards of all the major companies, which is anti competitive too. They’ll always push for a product they own to their other companies. They know when their other portfolio companies are doing layoffs, what they’re paying their staff, etc. they even share that with other companies so they can “compete” on salaries.
For an industry that cargo culted anti cargo culting, the management and execs all cargo cult the same over hiring and mass layoffs.
Employees get treated like crap now.
10 years ago I’d work overtime near a big release or when there was an outage. But now you get pinged all the time, there are no boundaries, and there’s an expectation. I’ve had CEOs joke about 9-9-6 work schedules and just openly flaunting how much worse they can make your life.
The terminal rot starts when your company brings in some ex Amazon or Meta execs (C suite, VP, director, whatever). They push for an almost pure numbers perspective. Judgement and morality be damned, think of the metric first.
Numbers are what these people know — these people survived the natural selection process at the most hostile and politicking companies you can think of. They’ll do anything to survive and get ahead.
You cut your support team as a cost centre — support doesn’t scale.
Then before you know it you’re 4 years into “we just have to push extra hard this year guys, the pace will slow down next year, we’ll get headcount too”. The whole time your performance reviews are getting more frequent and become more invasive — we’re adding an AI use component, make sure to list your growth areas and the impact (metrics!) of everything you’ve shipped. Remember, you’re competing with everyone we could hire, so how did you get better than them this quarter?
This field used to be good. And no, it wasn’t free lunches that made it good. It was having teams that gave a shit about the customer, it was putting the customer above all else, and it was going home feeling like you worked on something useful and good. You worked hard, you delivered value, and you got paid well.
It was good when it was new and growing and adding to innovation. Once the bean counters figured out the grey beards’ magic it got corrupted.
I grew up with stories of kids my age literally changing the world with new technologies and standards for the tech world. All the way into college, those people were innovating and developing things and having ethical back bones.
We were a generation of Nikola Teslas, but we didnt see the Edisons that were hiding in the wings.
Its like a bad ex you dont go back to them. You move on and find better. In this case join/make a better one, or if still in a company then mass unionize
A Union would be nice for crap like this. If you make more than $27.63 they don’t have to pay you overtime. I had a co worker that was asked to work overtime, like 13 years ago, and his contractor wasn’t going to pay him overtime.
The workers are the industry. The greedy shareholders are the problem.
Time to go to private unionized companies for existing and new alternatives to existing ones
well fuckin do it then
Living wage, universal basic income. The cure for failing capitalism. If this happened, the entire population can now be included in the system, rather than marginalized and pushed further away.
I just lost my union a couple months ago, they still exist I guess the government decided they didn’t want some of us to have a union going forward.
Same, apparently its a “national security” risk.
let them eat AI costs, if they don’t want to deal with unions!
I have always found it odd that tech/IT is not more unionized and supervised by some sort of professional order.
Doctors, nurses, construction workers, airline pilots etc are all deemed important trades and professions that require some form of professional order to supervise and attest the competency of the labor.
But for some reason IT is all like “you watched some Youtube videos, got certified by Cisco 15 years ago? All set to configure the security of our healthcare network”. I am exaggerating obviously but still… IT is so intertwined in everything some sort of professional order would make sense. And union definitely.
Forming new professional bodies takes time, administration, and some kind of governance structure. There aren’t a lot of grey-beards that have a bunch of spare time for organizing that. Also, historically, most IT people have seen themselves as “lone wolf frontiersmen” and the rate at which the industry has changed has made any kind of professional certification obsolete very quickly. Legal statutes, the frontiers of medicine, the best practices and techniques for pipe joining and bricklaying, etc. advance very slowly by comparison. Mature industries are much easier to unionize on average. IT is spectacularly immature (in multiple ways) by comparison so it’s very hard to create a professional body to represent tech workers.
Would it be good if we had something like that? Yes. Is it going to be easy to build, hell no. A better model might be the development of independent tech co-operatives, with distributed ownership. If a bunch of senior software engineers with some spare cash to pool creating a bunch of major tech competitors with a co-operative ownership model might actually serve the industry much better than the centralized corporate model we find ourselves subject to, AND provide a basis for developing industry unions, but the closest the industry has to something like that at a large scale is… well Valve, and even that’s not a true co-operative.
It’s kind of dumb to say IT people want to union but “the industry” doesn’t want to.
Guess “who” is the industry? Yeah, you are right, it’s the IT people…
