Damn, wtf are intuit and GM doing to their engineers?
Idk about intuit but GM is probably a result of their union coworkers getting awesome Bennie’s.
The union autoworkers get good benefits like overtime pay for work over 8 hours. Union working come in at 6, then take a fixed breakfast and lunch break and then leave at 2:30. Anything over that will need approval and overtime pay. I’m surprised Ford and Stellantis isn’t alongside with GM.
10% of people are insane so they even got significant chunks of the crazy vote for GM and Intuit
Holy shit Intuit and GM better shape the fuck up or the workers should just hurry up and fucking do it.
GM also has tons of union employees which has some impact on the non-union portion (i.e. better benefits etc), so seeing first-hand what unions can do for you might make them more likely to support one even if their current working conditions are great.
Not bad, I thought our heads were still further up our asses.
When I think of a tech worker union my thoughts first go to standardizing everyone’s pay and limiting what I can earn myself. I’ve probably fallen to anti-union propaganda.
A tech worker union that says nothing about pay could still do so much.
A union could ensure that the company’s incentives are aligned with worker’s incentives around things like on-call.
I’d love a union that forced a company to give all on-call workers compensation. Something like:
- If you’re woken up in the middle of the night, you automatically get 8 hours comp time (time off), plus 2x the time you spend on-call during off hours.
- Accrued comp time over 20 hours must be payed at 10x normal pay if the employee leaves the company for any reason. The idea here isn’t for employees to accrue comp time, but to give the company a strong incentive to ensure employees use their comp time.
Basically, if a company is having lots of on-call alerts, or the company is preventing employees from using their comp time, you want this to be directly painful to the company. Incentives should be aligned, what is painful for the worker should be painful for the company.
Or, regarding “unlimited PTO”. I’d love to see a union force companies to:
- “Unlimited PTO” policies are fine, but they must have a guaranteed minimum amount of PTO specified in writing. So none of this “yeah, we heave ‘unlimited PTO’; oh, we’re really busy this quarter, so can you wait to take PTO until next quarter?”.
Tech workers have it good compared to a lot of workers, but there are still plenty of abuses a union could help with, even if the union never even mentions pay.
A union lets you have leverage when negotiating for anything with the corpo. Individually you have a little if you’re top talent, and none otherwise. Very few people are irreplaceable, some are somewhat painful to replace, the rest are less so. We’ve been mistaking the tight labor market in this industry for our own self worth but hopefully the last couple of years have helped most of us snap out of it.
Speaking of pay, the structures I’ve seen at a union university for example have pay scales based on the job and defined pay increases in every job. You know what you’re gonna get paid for a position you’re applying, and you know what you’re gonna get paid years ahead in that job. With that said, a union can negotiate any sort of pay scheme. Perhaps most importantly a union can negotiate to get a much larger portion of the profits for the engineers. You think some folks in tech are paid very well, but if you look at the value they generate, they might not be paid nearly enough. If you think a union might take your 500K salary to 300K while raising some other people’s salaries you should consider that a union can take it to 800K or more. Assuming this is happening at one of the wildly profitable companies where this money exists.
And of course a union gives you the leverage to negotiate any other conditions like the ones that you mentioned. On-call, PTO, remote, etc.
Another concern I have - which might also be anti-union propaganda - is that I won’t be allowed to do certain things because that job is supposed to be done by someone else according to the contract.
I hate doing that sort of thing because it makes me wait and by the time they get back to me another fire has started that I have to put out and it takes me a while to get back to the first thing.
I’d be happy to hear this isn’t a legitimate concern.
You’re unlikely to be told that you aren’t allowed to do this or that, unless it’s a safety violation of some sort. The idea that you can describe jobs to the letter and everyone is aware of what’s written there and only does that is absurd. What’s in the job descriptions protects you against abuse if someone makes you do things aren’t paid for trained for, capable of, etc. It’s a backstop. It doesn’t prevent you from doing other things. In fact doing extra is a basis for promotion, just like it works in non-union shops. That’s what how I’ve seen things working in a unionised university I have access to.
In any case, if a union card comes to my desk, I’d get the power first and worry about these details later. At least someone would ask me how I want these things to work, instead of telling me with the only alternative being to leave the company or be fired.
While I agree it is absurd, it absolutely happens. See the Las Vegas convention workers union. I was told that one worker could not plug-in an extension cord that had been previously plugged in because it wasn’t his job. There were numerous other instances exactly like that, while working a convention center floor.
It does happen.
That’s not the case the parent was asking about though. They were asking whether they can do more than what’s in their job description. Not whether someone else is obliged to do more.
I don’t doubt your experience and it’s totally fine by me. That’s how they want to run their workplace, that’s the way they run it. It doesn’t mean you’re gonna make yours like that. It’s unlikely that a software org would be run like that. At the end of the day unions are democratic institutions where their members decide how to do these things. Because of that, your current org would likely be run the way you and your colleagues want to run it. Not in some bizarre way that Las Vegas convention workers do. :D
Thanks for the answer!
Honestly, the fact that junior folks won’t be allowed to do things would be great. I’d love to see IT getting proper engineering certifications. People wouldn’t allow their factories to be built by non-certified engineers, but they’ll let their nephew who’s good with computers build their network. Seems like unions could help with that, too.
Those compensation requirements would basically make it financially impossible to have someone on-call or they’d just have to hire people for those hours and say they are normal working hours.
How would you force someone to take time off?
How would you force someone to take time off?
If I was their boss I would say something like “you’re job is to stay home and do anything besides work for the next week, you will still be paid for this time”. Easy.
As for the on-call stuff. Yes, that’s the point. It should be unsustainable for a company to continually rely on their daytime programmers for frequent on-call alert handling.
If off-hours issues happen often, the company can hire an additional team to handle off-hours issues. If off-hours issues are rare, then you can depend on your daytime programmers to handle the rare off-hours issue, and know that they will be fairly compensated for being woken up in the middle of the night.
I’ve been at too many companies where an off-hours alert wakes up a developer in the middle of the night and the next day the consensus is “that’s not good, but we’ll have to fix the underlying issue after we finish implementing the new UI the design team is excited about”. It’s not right for a developer to get woken up in the middle of the night, and then the company puts fixing that on the backburner.
I’ll say it again. It’s about aligning incentives. When things that are painful for the worker are also painful for the company, that is alignment. Unfortunately, most companies have the opposite of alignment, if a developer gets woken in the middle of the night the end result for the company is that they got some additional free labor, that’s pain for the worker, reward for the company; that’s wrong.
“that’s not good, but we’ll have to fix the underlying issue after we finish implementing the new UI the design team is excited about”
Classic. Once I landed in a team who’s been woken up every night, often multiple times a night for several years. The people left were so worn down, burnt out and depressed that it was obvious just by looking at them. The company has cut the team to the bone and the only people left were folks that didn’t have the flashy resumes to easily escape. They had drawn up plans to fix the system years ago. BTW, none of that was disclosed to me until I had signed up and showed up for work and asked who are those miserable looking people over there. “That’s your team” the man replied.
Those compensation requirements would basically make it financially impossible to have someone on-call or they’d just have to hire people for those hours and say they are normal working hours
These are not the only options. Here are some others:
- Ensuring the on-call load is shared more evenly so that everyone is woken up under the painful limit
- Fixing the broken shit that keeps waking people up, which they keep ignoring because “it’s low priority”
- Hiring people for a night shift, appropriately compensated for their diminished health and other life impacts. The union can ensure such positions aren’t paid the same as normal work hours while not being prohibitively expensive. Night shifts are a standard thing in some occupations
Something’s telling me most orgs where 2 is an option would go with that. Related to that - increases in labor compensation is what forces companies to spend money on capital investment that increases productivity - read new equipment, automation, fixing broken shit, etc. If there are cheap enough slaves to wake up during the night, doing this investment is “low priority” (more expensive) and isn’t done.
Anything using Blind as a “verified industry source” is going to be skewed to the type of person who uses Blind. Beyond that, it’s low sample size, and there are suspiciously round fractions for some of the larger companies. Worse, because Blind is blind - this doesn’t represent current employees, but merely people who worked at some point in the past at those companies.
Not saying it’s not good - just saying not to get overly excited over a badly done survey
Doesn’t blind require you to validate via corporate email yearly or something?
Only on signup
How afraid are you of retribution if you tried to unionize?
I guess not much if I were an Intuit employee and significantly if I were at Apple. 😄
That’s why you get as many people to sign up first, organize BEFORE the vote, not after.
How afraid of retribution is my manager/ hr because they’re all too fat to walk home when they get 4 flat tires.
Wow that’s crazy that such a thing could happen. What are the chances.
The US labor laws need to be updated too. They suck compared to the 1st World EU members. I fully support unions too.
Would a union be able to repeal this lame IT overtime pay expectation? This dumb rule was the $27.63 over ten years ago too. I once worked at a place and a co-worker was told by his staffing agency that they didn’t have to pay overtime.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-computer#:~:text=However%2C Section 13(a)(,duties%20and%20who%20are%20paid
Unions generally don’t write or repeal laws, but a union contract can negotiate overtime pay where there isn’t any.
Absolutely. I’ve been laid off twice in my IT career. It would be nice to have someone on my side for a change.
What is the legality of unions across the US?
Unions are legal in the US. The labor movement is currently seeing a huge swell in new bargaining units across most unions
My company is on there. I wish we had a union
Make an alt-alt over VPN and tells us more. 😁
Get ready for corporate announcing the layoff of 67% of the workforce
They’re doing that in any case when they can get away with it. Not forming a union isn’t going stop them.
If that happens, they are going to see a lot of things seemingly from the past connected to union activity though.
Not just strike breakers being hired (some of tech work is not that demanding in expertise, think typical Hindu web devs), but also actual spies, saboteurs, hitmen being involved, propaganda attacks, possibly legal attempts to bust unions and use of force. And, of course, crucial positions in union bureaucracy becoming attractive for organized crime (which likely has very few of people associated with it ever convicted, as in mostly invisible until it’s too late).
Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. Just the more adult level of the game. Considering that the tech industry is at the core of our civilization now, and considering its profits, this can get as historic as battle of the Blair mountain.
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As much as I love the sounds of that it seems like a good way to get arrested under some anti-hacking laws.
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The Judge and Jury don’t have to know how a kill switch works. The Judge and Jury have to believe the expert testimony that one was placed and caused damage.
Sam Bankman Freed didn’t get jail time because the judge and jury understood the nuances of cryptocurrency and financial scams.
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That feels like a very… hopeful interpretation. Instead of “In my expert opinion there is no non-malicious use of this component, and SysadminX was the only one with possible access.”
Intent is not always necessary, it depends on the charges.
Computer Forensics isn’t a new discipline at this point. People have literally gone to jail for putting in kill switches. It’s possible SysadminX is actually smarter than teams of people that are dissecting what happened after they were fired and is a real life Keyser Soze, but it’s extremely unlikely.
Honestly, you don’t have to create a kill switch. Most stuff will fall apart due to dependency on manual intervention. Usually because there isn’t enough staff to automate it. Tech debt comes for everyone.
Yes, I do think that.
I agree, this particular trait of today’s tech industry in this particular case works in our favor.
For other political and social factors - not so much.
These numbers seem grossly inflated. How was the study conducted?
Edit:
However, on average 67% of those polled in the Blind survey said they were likely to join a union and 73% said that unions “mostly helped.”
Eh that’s reasonable. Blind (the app) is pretty good, alibet toxic
Apple, tesla, and Google suspiciously at the bottom three there
