Thread 106206767

The only thing that can defeat unemployment is unions.

Software engineers need to unionize. There's no other way to solve the problem.
Companies won't be able to get their software off the ground if a union doesn't allow them to hire coders for low pay on the country's soil.

Bit too late for unions in software, companies are already outsourcing to India where they don’t have to worry about it, even if it makes the product shit, the execs don’t care. They don’t use it. Forming a union would just accelerate that process.

>>106206788
Yes goy, don't unionize, you'll get outsourced goy.

>>106206767 (OP)
>Software engineers need to unionize. There's no other way to solve the problem.
You'll probably call me a shill, but unions won't work for software developers and I can explain to you why.
Do you remember when Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars and everyone lost their shit about it? OMG how is this Instagram worth more than Kodak?? Kodak had over 100,000 employees at some point, and instagram was like 30 employees.
Unions only work at the scale of Kodak, not at the scale of Instagram. You cannot just replace 10,000 people in a month. Even if their job is just low end factory line work, like they're replacable cogs. It is not logistically possible. There's no place for them to live, you'd need to build a whole factory town just to bring in that many new people. So when those 100,000 people band together, they have power. Fuck with one guy and we all stop working and your business shuts down.
Now compare that with software devs. Let's say they are replaceable cogs, just doing jeet level glue code. They can be replaced easily. Any major city is going to have housing. You can be flooded with 1000 resumes on linked in in just one day. You can replace all thirty cogs overnight. Boom, you are all fired.
Let's even say they are NOT replacable cogs, and it's going to take a lot of time to find people to replace them. Still not a problem. Fire all 30? The software they wrote continues working. There's no factory line down, the code is still there, the servers are still there, the company still owns everything. The software dev doesn't have to be present for it to continue working.
So you see, unions are just pointless for software development.

That said, you're probably thinking now, hmmm, maybe we can have a professional guild. But that requires laws that say companies can only hire accredited programmers because bad programs are dangerous or some other bullshit. But as soon as programmers hear this, they will actually fight you. Even if you explain you're trying to help them stop the companies abusing them, they will fight you. Why? Because who says you know WTF a good programmer is and a bad programmer is? A lot of us, who consider ourselves good programmers are self taught. We don't have degrees. We can write brilliant code. But we hear about this plan and we instantly know it's going to be about how much money we spent on a school, not about our skill level. I'd say that the number of programmers I've met in industry that actually have a compsci degree are like 10%. Basically everyone is going to see you as someone trying to flush them out of their jobs.

unions with actual bargaining power aren't really legal anymore

>>106206919
This isn't 1910
Where have you been?
Unions now either suck off shareholders, push identity bullshit instead of helping anyone or both
Screaming C'MON GUYS LETS UNIONISE!!! is the left-wing version of trickle down will save le economy

So what do I think is actually going to happen? I think good programmers, smart ones, they're going to look at this situation and say
>I'm losing right now because my cost of living is high. I need to leave the USA.
Because realistically, all I need to do my job is a laptop and a good internet connection. I can spin up EC2 instances in Tokyo just as fast as I can in north Virginia or Oregon. So instead of fighting this battle over getting higher pay, all the brains in the US are going to drain away to countries who allow us to immigrate to them easily. Places in Eastern Europe, places like Costa Rica, Phillipines, Georgia. I've already done this. I have a house in Japan. The cost of living in Japan is like 1/3 of what it is in the US. I can spend 6 months a year there with a digital nomad visa.
There's just no point in trying to stay in the USA anymore. Once you leave the country for a while, you realize it's not really that nice here in the US anyway. But I have the major advantage that I have US citizenship. A lot of companies have to hire citizens for whatever reason. So if I'm a citizen, but I'm a low cost of living one, it's easy for a company to justify hiring me. A white male, not a veteren or filling any other diversity quota. Just a regular ol Timmy.

Anyway, sorry to shit up your thread. I hope you enjoyed my blog.

Unions can't even save menial jobs. How would it save software engineering?

>>106207363
The other big issue with licensing is that it usually transfers legal responsibility for fuck ups to the employee and away from the company. No one who writes software wants to be on the hook for millions in damaged and have their license revoked because some process goes insane.
For it to work, licensed developers would need to have the right to tell their employer to fuck off if pressured to do anything stupid. Which seems nice but isn't something the typical developer has the social skills to do. Plus software development isn't really mature enough for that level of guarantee. It might never be that mature as software has far fewer constraints on it than the physical world.

>>106207363
>I'd say that the number of programmers I've met in industry that actually have a compsci degree are like 10%.
There's no way this is actually true especially if we're talking about the United States and natural born U.S. citizens.

>>106206767 (OP)
Unions exist to shield incompetent workers from accountability. So nothing would change.

>>106207604
More like 90%. But I've never met a *good* programmer with a CS degree.

>>106207309
retard

>>106207363
Could be fixed by giving the self taught devs honorary degrees.

>>106207678
Yeah or a license to practice coding

Unionize a bunch of spergs and immigrants?
We need standards, which would flush out 80% of software """""engineers"""""

At least there's https://instituteforsoundpublicpolicy.org/ustechworkers/

>>106207615
Sounds about right. Do you find that those who are actually good tend to have no degree at all or a degree in a different field?

>>106207734
Either unions or government mandated licenses.

>>106207309
Not wrong but most of FAGMAN & co compensation is stock. Even if unions did nothing but increase wages slightly, they'd make nasdaq tank.
Also, you're greatly overestimating how easy it is to replace people who do real work. Even replacing 1000 people on assembly lines would take months. Software outsourcing doesn't work at all for anything that matters.

>>106206767 (OP)
>The only thing that can defeat unemployment is unions.
Is this bait? Unions do the opposite.
>>106206788
>>106206919
The GPL is the programmer's equivalent of what you want. It works *way* better than a union, it means the corporation can't hold you or your work hostage and if they do something dumb you can just go somewhere else. This is the reason so many of us avoid non-free software, it's not just ideological, it gives you an *incredible* amount of negotiating power without having to talk through some retarded bureaucrat who doesn't understand the situation.

>>106207734
You are literally retarded. Even middling US state universities are way better than even european ones.
>>106207874
You don't understand how firms work. The same code can be worthless to your collective and worth tens of billions to corpos, like KHTML. FOSS is completely irrelevant to tech employment and getting more money out of your work.

>>106207734
You are literally retarded. Even middling US state universities are way better than european ones.
>>106207874
You don't understand how firms work. The same code can be worthless to your collective and worth tens of billions to corpos, like KHTML. FOSS is completely irrelevant to tech employment and getting more money out of your work.

I think a lot of good could be done even by merely forming a union-but-small-scope.
Like, don't try to do the full package of what unions normally do. The only shit you put in the collective agreement is:
>the company must disclose to the union the salaries and compensation of all staff (yes, even non-members)
>any employee has the right to a union representative in a meeting discussing salary or employment contract negotiations
Now all you need to do is collect enough union dues to train a few shop stewards, who've been at the company a few years, to sit in on employment contract negotiations and go, "nah, they're fucking low balling your ass, push harder." They don't need to be lawyers or anything, just straight up volunteers.
You'd probably just need $200 / mo in dues per steward to fund a seminar once a year, and you can spread it across the entire membership (so 20 people pay $10, lol).

>>106206767 (OP)
Unions are retard trap, we see it's perfect example in American VA scene.

> Noooo, you ignored our le very important anti-AI protest that is not even targeting actual problem because we did just surface-level research about it! Lets us bully you into submission or cut you away from all projects!
> What do you mean that companies started hiring English voice actors not working in America? Just REEEEEEE louder, slaves! REEEEEE as loud as you can or we will write an upsetting post on Xitter.com about how you support literal Nazis and are rapist anti-Jew.

Unions are slavery.

>>106206767 (OP)
>>106206788
> american problems
are not my problems. other better countries have unions.

>>106207309
>>106207363
> chatgpt slop
kill yourself

>>106207831
people doing real work can negotiate 7-figure compensation or billion dollar zukbux and would be hindered by unions

>>106206767 (OP)
>don't join a union that will fight for higher income together!
>play vidya games instead!

The american golden age of the 50's was because everyone was unionized and the billionaires taxed to hell.

>>106206767 (OP)
We have a union for IT pros in Australia they do fucking nothing.

>>106207363
>A lot of us, who consider ourselves good programmers are self taught. We don't have degrees. We can write brilliant code
You sound like a Jeetvascript code artisan from Hacker News. Top midwit comment

>>106209740
Australian Computer Society?
They get paid big money for conducting "migrant skill assessments" required for "skilled" migrant visa applications.
So in fact they're actively making Australian IT workers worse off by profiting on flooding the market with unlimited jeets while lobbying the government for more immigration to fill "skill shortages".

>>106206767 (OP)
You can only unionize stuff that can't be replaced. That means stuff like teachers and police in the usa. That's why they both have strong unions. Unions otherwise make an industry uncompetitive, like what happened to much of manufacturing in the usa. Tech workers are some of the most replaceable workers.

>>106210072
>can't be replaced. That means stuff like teachers
teachers are fucking worthless and aren't even required to begin with, let alone replaced. just give the students a list of questions that will be on the exam and let them prepare on their own.

the actual purpose of school is
>keeping kids/teenagers confined during the working hours of the day to prevent petty hooliganism
>conditioning kids to operate in platoon sized units under commissioned officers to speed up the training of soldiers during conscription

>>106210072
Nah, that's just the "easy mode" and why that shit is still unionized.
You do need an actual strategic plan for organizing though. A lot of the internet lefties aren't actually good at this part, and so they post threads like this shit and just optimism-max like that's actually going to work.
I don't actually have any suggestions for organizing tech though. There's a reason the major players in the labour movement haven't moved on that shit yet (other than being lazy shits who lost institutional memory of how to organize).
And, heck, sometimes killing the industry you organize is part of the strategic plan. Which sounds cynical, but legitimately sometimes it's better to squeeze the fruit on a dying tree to get some money in people's pensions or retirement funds. You can do it in a non-exploitative way if people are clear on the long term plan.

Also, you can't blame unions for making manufacturing uncompetitive in the US. There is no fucking world where an American accepts the same wage as Chinese factory workers, union or not. You could go work hotel/retail/minimum wage for more money than Chinese factory workers.
You think fucking textile manufacturing would come back to the US if they paid US minimum wage, non-union???

>>106206767 (OP)
All the programmers and software "engineers" will be flipping burgers at the end of this decade, union won't change anything

>>106207874
>The GPL is the programmer's equivalent of what you want. It works *way* better than a union
If you work for a corporation you don't chose what license your work will be distributed under. Licensing is decided by the corporation and has nothing to do with unions.

>>106206767 (OP)
>unions
Hell no. The main good thing about software is you don't need a degree, you need skills, so there is an on-ramp there, you can get a shitty coding job, build experience for a few years, and then you can do high paid corporate jobs or whatever you want. If this industry were regulated then it would be basically kicking away the onramp for new entrants, making life much harder for them and protecting the mid to late career people.

>>106206767 (OP)
All the unions that have gotten off the ground have been staffed by people with aposematic hair coloring and devoted their time to getting people fired for wrongthink
Scrap the H-1B program and we’ll talk afterwards

>>106207309
>Kodak had over 100,000 employees at some point, and instagram was like 30 employees.
Unions only work at the scale of Kodak, not at the scale of Instagram.
Ok.............. but Facebook has 100,000 employees?????????

>>106206788
>companies are already outsourcing to India
Why have I been seeing this said so much recently. This has been happening for like 15+ years now. If anything, tech companies are starting to move away from random outsourced Indian work because the quality is dogshit. 9/10 times I have to deal with someone in the Indian side of my company, it's always a hassle, they clearly have zero idea what's going on and the work is half-assed.

techbros are all retarded "fuck you got mine" libertarians so any tech industry union would collapse as soon as a few members get a nice bonus one year and sabotages the whole thing

and you can't rally the few actual humans in the field because honestly tech work wages and benefits are quite good and there are not so many real non-bullshit jobs in it that either an employee feels threatened or an employer can be held hostage by the labor force

>>106207874
case in point
>we should have an organization that protects workers and prevents abuse of the actual humans in the field
>HURRR JUST LICENSE UR WERK UNDER GPL FOR LE FIGGIES???

>>106206767 (OP)
700 dollars a year is fucking peanuts lmao. I'd pay that for job security in a heartbeat rent is more than three times that.

>>106212309
this, i pay more than that into my pension monthly and if i had a union they should also be providing a pension

>>106210237
>i flunked out of uni because i'm dumb: the post

>>106206767 (OP)
Unions are cancerous tumors that fuck over the working class by creating exclusive labor cartels and by raising prices for consumer goods.

Also if you think you're being replaced by AI now, wait until you start unionizing.

>>106212940
you've been pwned by psyops but
>if you think you're being replaced by AI now, wait until you start unionizing.
the whole point of a union is to create more bargaining power for workers be eliminating the threat of simply firing individual workers who ask for "too much" (since now you will be firing all of them, and it's cheaper to just pay the extra buck an hour or provide better tools or w/e than to have higher turnover and thus massively bloated training and hr costs)

unionizing "tech" workers indeed wouldn't work because you're a dime a dozen and do nothing useful for anyone and on top of that have a tendency to automate yourself out of your own jobs

>>106209333
based and checked

>>106212257
/thread
divide and conquer is laughably easy in tech because there are so many single digit IQ lolberts

>>106212257
And so many of them are just completely detached from reality. I don't know of any company where developers just get to chose the fucking license. I know /g/ is mostly just larping NEETs but that example is a special kind of retard even considering this shitholes already low standards.

>>106213112
you should have a look at /twg/ sometime. people will legit just tell eachother to switch entire networking stacks at an established business because "LOL CISCO IS FOR POORFAGS" and nothing else

What if we banded together and bought a cruise ship and ran a company BY US FOR US from international waters ?

>>106206919
if the unions here fought against immigrants and outsourcing they'd be more popular
but they don't for some reason. there's external threats to most unions but the internal threats render them permanently useless

>>106213259
a new aids pandemic

>>106213338
>a new aids pandemic
Just close the pools and stay away from the ocean you'll be fine.

>>106213043
>you've been pwned by psyops
Nah I read economics and history unlike you.
>bargaining power for workers
For a small group of workers that have every incentive to fuck over the vast majority of workers.
>eliminating the threat of simply firing individual workers who ask for "too much"
Workers do this all the time and the company complies and pays them more.
They can threaten to to go another firm.
Also why would you fire a worker for asking too much? You can simply say no.
>and it's cheaper to just pay the extra buck an hour or provide better tools
That's literally why companies do this naturally.
The times they don't is because they don't have the funds and/or aren't as profitable.

>>106213408
>every incentive to fuck over the vast majority of workers.
why do they have incentive to fuck over other workers? if anything, they have incentive to help those workers so that the union becomes more popular and thus more powerful

>Workers do this all the time and the company complies and pays them more.
this has never happened ever

>They can threaten to to go another firm.
only true thing in your post; this is why unionization cannot work in "tech". wages and bennies are already very good so employees can just jump ship. the main reason they don't is that there aren't enough jobs to go around, but that just further disincentivizes employees from asking for even more since employers hold more power in the job market. unionization only really works in fields where the work force at a given company can comfortably quit en-masse (since as expensive as it is for the company to hire and train people, the people working also don't want the uncertainty associated with quitting and would rather the lesser uncertainty associated with just bullying the current employer)

>Also why would you fire a worker for asking too much? You can simply say no.
because boomer bosses are psychopathic

>>106213259
I'll make the logo.
Can we use LORA to get an alternative internet going?

>>106213480
>why do they have incentive to fuck over other workers
Its a labour cartel/secret club.
New members reduce the wages if existing ones. Also competing firms are also a threat.
Also unions raise prices on consumer goods the working class buys.
>this has never happened ever
Lol you've never worked a day in your life obviously

>because boomer bosses are psychopathic
Why would they intentionally destroy their workforce and have to spend a bunch of money to hire again?
Companies that don't do this will become more profitable.

I was just reading an article about TikTok's shitcanning their German jannies:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/10/tiktok-trust-safety-team-moderators-ai

Apparently they have a union.

>>106213529
>New members reduce the wages if existing ones.
no they don't. one of the most basic things almost every union does is standardize wages.

>Also competing firms are also a threat.
this is why in fields that actually matter, unions form larger bands of organizations across the entire field. and ideally, a place being unionized and thus having higher wages, better bennies, etc. would make it more attractive to workers, increasing "competition" i.e. securing access to higher quality applicants. when a union functions correctly among the trades, it becomes more of a guild

>Also unions raise prices on consumer goods the working class buys.
wages are among the smallest parts of overhead in the actual cost of a modern consoomer good. that 2100$ macbook didn't cost 2000$ of man-hours to make. and margins are not so slim that the consoomer price can't stay stable

>Why would they intentionally destroy their workforce and have to spend a bunch of money to hire again?
watched too many episodes of "dirty jobs" before going on LinkedIn

>>106206767 (OP)
How will that work when they'll just outsource your job to a pajeet on the other side of the planet?

>>106213660
the union will fight the scabs by organizing a boycott of the company and bringing attention to the issue and in a true democracy with responsible voters fulling exercising their objective freedom the company will be expropriated and its shareholders executed

unions are for faggots, fuck outta here

>>106207550
The only unions that seem to work are the high-end "guild" types like in Hollywood (SAG) or professional sports (NFLPA).
Or the trade unions that are mostly a way to get group insurance rates.
Maybe programmers could have unionized as late as 10 years ago but with outsourcing and AI that moment has passed.

>>106206767 (OP)
Unions won't work for CS people in the US for the same reason they don't work for construction people in the South and Southwest:

Outsourcing.

>ahmahgerd muh weekends and muh maternity leave

That happened during a time when Americans were the only people working those jobs.

>>106213621
>wages are among the smallest parts of overhead in the actual cost of a modern consoomer good
LOOOOLLL

>>106214221
like i said already the main reason unions work in certain fields is that they're already at least semi-skilled labour and the workers are not replaceable. cooooders love to go on about how "programmers are not fungible" but at the end of the day Your Own Style isn't enough to make up for the fact that there are millions of retards lining up to fix your SAP module. at least in something like film, the market of people who know how to operate properly on a set and are willing to just move lights around (not even configure them; just haul them about for the real lighting specialists) for 20$/h is shockingly limited and directors/producers have seen first hand that just hiring some mexican to do it for 3$/h will result in a lot of smashed lights as they just yeet them around so letting grips into the film union is practically a necessary evil.

techbros are in a saturated field where there is minimal penalty for abject failure and way too many people lining up to do it at least somewhat competently, and the few that get to work in it enjoy very good wages and benefits for what little they do. unions are unnecessary if not an active detriment to not just their own field but everyone they touch, it would be like having a union for landlords

>>106213660
Require QA of outsourced code to require a license to code

>>106206767 (OP)
This is actually great. All the push to get women into software has disappeared overnight. They're remembering that healthcare industry provides the stability women desire, just like we said and (mainly) shutting the fuck up about it so we can work with the men and women who for whatever reason actually like programming.

>>106216766
Coding license isn't a good idea

>>106211427
trump's making it so businesses and universities have to compete for the same pool of h1bs
thats gonna mean a lot less in tech

>>106206767 (OP)
As an actually competent coder, why would I unionize?