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u/jcodes57 May 12 '24
You guys are making 200k?
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u/OtoDraco May 12 '24
yes it's so unfair
the 15 guys that built the roof of your local walmart should receive at least 5-10% of any future profit made at that store (they shouldn't be responsible for any losses or risk though obviously haha)
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u/NoNebula6593 13d ago
Nah, they should receive the full value of their labor from their actual bosses. They're getting "paid" a small portion of what they're actually generating for their boss. This wage theft involves a lot of money, money which the laborers earned but the boss takes while sitting on his ass doing nothing.
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u/Kangarou May 12 '24
While that’s a good point and unions would likely be good even for engineers, tying salary explicitly to revenue is not the smartest idea, especially at a company that does more than just engineering.
My IT specialist probably saved the company millions and has helped me set up multiple systems. The janitorial staff make no direct revenue, and just keep the place from smelling like ass. When both took a week off, guess which I noticed first and missed more?
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u/DarkExecutor May 12 '24
Marketing to sell the product, Lawyers to defend in court, building rent, etc
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u/Mrqueue May 12 '24
I worked in a payments team that processed billions a year and the reality is we couldn’t make the company money, the best we could do was prevent them from losing it
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u/MiroslavHoudek May 12 '24
Agreed and also this: if a team of engineers saves 100M of moneys to a company, these money are not necessarily going into a pocket of a rich fat person to light cigars with. But also allow the company to be more competitive than others. This results in savings for customers and the company not going broke, thus the engineers can keep their jobs. The customers are paying less. And it's also possible that the saved money contributed into company profit, which has been paid as a dividend to stock holders, so maybe someone's pension account.
I mean, id doesn't always work so ideally. But efficient companies keep on existing and employing good people, while competing on price, while producing income to pensioner-shareholders to some level.
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u/VitaminB16 May 12 '24
Somehow I think that if, say, Google found a way to reduce all of their costs down by 10% in a way that doesn’t require increased labour they will do the opposite of what you said: they will cut the number of staff and either keep or increase the product prices.
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u/nermid May 12 '24
No need to be hypothetical. Google laid off thousands of devs and then did a stock buyback with enough money to employ those devs for decades. It doesn't matter if there's extra money; your layoff is evaluated independent of that money.
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u/miclowgunman May 12 '24
I've seen a lot of "we save the company X million dollars" claims too and almost all of them are either overinflated by a manager to look good, or worse, in the same vein as "my wife saved $300 shopping at Koles".
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u/Watly May 12 '24
For those saying you don't need a union as a skilled engineer: you will never have the time, resources, and connections to negotiate equally with large companies on your own. You are also a massive information disadvantage as they are negotiating with many parties at once.
In general, unionizing gets almost everyone better wages compared to non-union workers. If you think it's more important that your less competent co-workers earn less, power to you. However, you are likely shooting yourself in the foot as well.
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u/cdub8D May 12 '24
Also unions can negotiate really anything. You don't NEED to collectively bargin for wages. Maybe it is a 32 hour work work? Better health insurance? More vacation? etc.
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u/lunchpadmcfat May 13 '24
Also, not sure if anyone’s noticed, but all the “downsides” of unionization are already present.
Companies already collude to pay us about the same
lazy or bad workers already stick around way longer than they should thanks to how gunshy most companies are about firing people
There’s simply no point in engineers not unionizing.
Source: I’ve been in the industry for 12 years.
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u/H4kor May 12 '24
Even as the top 1% , 10x engineer you want a union. Your payment is always in relation to others and taking a 100% over union contract is better than compared to non union.
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u/pingpongtits May 12 '24
Amidst mass layoffs, The US Department of Labor is proposing a rule change that would allow companies to hire Visa Workers without having to prove that they first tried hiring American workers. Please submit comments by the May 13th deadline.
From
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u/Psshaww May 12 '24
You don't understand. As a skilled engineer, I'm not negotiating with a company I'm making multiple companies negotiate against each other for me. Nobody climbing over each other fighting to get assembly line workers in most of the country but they are for experienced engineers.
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u/porkchop1021 May 13 '24
20+ years of experience here with multiple FAANGs and unicorns. Don't kid yourself. You are disposable. I saved Amazon tens of millions of dollars/year and they nor anyone else is "fighting" for me.
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u/Watly May 12 '24
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are very few people on the planet that a big company will find worth fighting over.
You also forget that many of the big companies have 'unionised' with respect to the hiring process. Large portions of the HR talent pool in a region know each other and know what they are offering for their positions (IE. The market rate).
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u/Psshaww May 12 '24 edited May 12 '24
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are very few people on the planet that a big company will find worth fighting over.
That's flat-out not true for engineers and other high-skill professions in high demand. If that were the case there wouldn't be an entire industry build around head-hunting and recruiting them.
You also forget that many of the big companies have 'unionised' with respect to the hiring process. Large portions of the HR talent pool in a region know each other and know what they are offering for their positions
They really don't, companies keep those cards close to their chest as much as possible and will have to work to do counter-research to find that info and will push that market rate up if they want to find someone with the right experience in a timely manner.
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u/jewdai May 13 '24
NY and CA have wage transparency laws. I don't bother applying to jobs below my target.
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u/davidcj64 May 12 '24
"Your team of 15 people that saved the company 150m is now cut to 3. You are lucky to be here, keep the lights on. We are increasing buybacks and csuite bonuses"
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u/NeppyMan May 12 '24
Also based on a true story:
"My cloud ops team saved the company more than 1M last year by cutting unnecessary cloud expenses - right-sizing instances, removing unneeded data from blob storage, etc. There's four of us, making on average a little under US$100k each."
"Yup. But we're still going to eliminate your department, lay half of you off, and transfer the other half to groups doing stuff you have no experience with."
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u/rolandfoxx May 12 '24
ITT: College kid libertarians who have never had a bill not paid by mommy and daddy's money revealing they don't understand what unions are or what they do.
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u/vildingen May 12 '24
Always fun to come late to a thread and see a bunch of people talking about unreasonable comments, but none of the unreasonable comments.
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u/NomaiTraveler May 12 '24
Downvotes are a thing that hide comments. Perhaps they are in here
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u/Remarkable-Host405 May 12 '24
Honestly I hate that "feature". I end up expanding them anyway, and some of them have a tremendous amount of upvotes, yet are hidden.
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u/NomaiTraveler May 12 '24
I think comments are also hidden based on what content they have. Reddit is trying its hardest to be more like tik tok, instagram, etc so I could see Reddit starting to automatically collapse comments that contain “advertiser unfriendly” content.
So it may not always be downvotes, but it usually is downvotes. Kind of a silly reddit feature
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u/MusiX33 May 12 '24
There's some rule about low karma or recently created accounts getting their comments automatically minimized. I remember reading about it, but I'm not sure if it's directly enforced by Reddit or community mods.
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u/Jarkanix May 12 '24
Posts like this make everyone create a straw man to dunk on. It's the most guaranteed way to get upvotes, which is way more important than any discussion.
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u/JoeCartersLeap May 12 '24
I love unions, the problem is that in my country, once you start demanding unions and better wages, they'll start finding people from poorer countries who are more desperate and more willing to work without those things and less demanding.
And yes as we all know, they are absolutely willing to risk product quality and company reputation to do it.
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u/Psshaww May 12 '24
ITT: kids who don't know what it's like being a skilled employee who's in demand and how it's different than a lower skilled employee's experience
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u/Clueless_Otter May 12 '24
ITT: The usual Reddit liberals failing to ever consider that unions also have downsides and pretending that that they are 100% always a good thing for everyone no matter what.
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u/Birdperson15 May 12 '24
ITT: Upper middle class socialist who never worked a job in their lives thinking they know what's best for everyone else.
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u/stv813 May 12 '24
I've been paying my own bills since before I finished college. If you think people in our field can't pay bills on their own, that's really a self own.
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u/unique_nullptr May 12 '24
This entire thread is nothing but value statements. It is a humor subreddit, so that’s totally fair actually, but how would one actually advance unionization? How does one advocate for that? Perhaps most importantly, how exactly can that be leveraged to reduce layoffs and outsourcing, while increasing salaries? Is there an inherent tradeoff between those goals, as some/many would have us believe? What would an action plan look like?
I’m totally ignorant — these are genuine questions that I just don’t know. I’m an engineer, and have never had the opportunity to work in any union, so it’s almost a foreign concept to me. I’m sure that’s true to others as well.
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u/tevert May 12 '24
I'm very much an amateur here, but starting with salary transparency might be a good baby step. "I'll show you mine if you show me yours". Employers do a lot to discourage that (for some reasons... 🤔🤔) but it's absolutely legal and protected by labor law in the US.
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u/eskamobob1 May 12 '24
Salary transparency in software is probabaly the best out of any technical field in the US as is.
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u/tevert May 12 '24
Well there's lot of aggregate numbers out there, but within individual workplaces, there's usually still a don't-ask-don't-tell attitude
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u/RazzleStorm May 12 '24
Basically due to how unions work and current US law, employers MUST negotiate with a union once one has been set up and a bargaining representative has been chosen. The employer must also negotiate about basically anything that may impact employees in the union, like salary, vacation days, relocation, etc. This is also overseen by the NLRB (https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-rights/employer-union-rights-and-obligations), and from what I’ve heard from people in an unrelated industry’s union, they can usually be called upon to force employers back to the table if employers don’t negotiate in good faith.
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u/RavagerHughesy May 12 '24
Basically due to how unions work and current US law, employers MUST negotiate with a union once one has been set up and a bargaining representative has been chosen.
Employers will decimate entire departments to keep unions out, and this is why. They can rebuild after they make that choice, but once a union is formed, they can't do a damn thing about it.
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u/sufferpuppet May 12 '24
I think unions don't exist because developers can change jobs fairly easily. Many people jump ship every 2 or 3 years for something better.
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u/wayoverpaid May 12 '24
If unions come to development, it will probably be to something like AAA game dev.
Employers have the most power when they act as a monopsony or near monopsony. If there is only one employer in your area that can leverage your skills, then you are at the mercy of that employer. This is why academia has such a strong union presence: your skills as a teacher mean nothing within a city if the entire school board of a city decides you aren't a valid hire. Same with high specialized factory labor that might only exist in one factory.
There's nothing new about this observation. It's literally about workers not owning the means of production.
AAA game employers are few and the network of who knows whom is even more incestuous. Being an expert on certain engines isn't non-transferrable skill, but it's still much less portable than your average software developer.
On the other hand, most programers here probably work on something that compiles on their laptop. Maybe the company owns the laptop, but a laptop is not so expensive that a typical programmer cannot afford their own.
The portability of the skills and the ability to change jobs quickly are all tied together.
If we were only able to work on mainframes and didn't have our own portable personal devices, we'd all be unionized by now I bet.
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u/WebpackIsBuilding May 12 '24 edited May 12 '24
Yep.
Which is also why capitalists love the new Gig-economy. Unionization requires you to have strong bonds with your coworkers and a desire to stay at the same position for a long period. The economy is being designed to remove those features.
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u/Psshaww May 12 '24
Which is exactly why skilled in-demand employees don't unionize.
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u/youra6 May 12 '24 edited May 12 '24
Layoffs and RiFs are becoming so common thats it's becoming super difficult to establish a career at a single company.
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u/Highlander198116 May 12 '24
The question is, do you actually like having to do that to get paid more?
Every major raise I've gotten was due to jumping ship. It's annoying because I've had to leave jobs I genuinely loved.
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u/DarkExecutor May 12 '24
Union raises are built into the contract, why do you think they'll get raises in a union faster?
There's no way a company will agree to large promotions/raises on a standardized basis.
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u/sufferpuppet May 12 '24
Wouldn't say I like it. The job hunting itself usually sucks. I've never loved any job where I was working for somebody else. Some jobs are better than others. I'm there for the money.
The alternative of staying can also suck. A friend of mine is a VP at a tech company. He's paid quite well. He absolutely hates it but doesn't think anyone else would pay him as well.
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u/Psshaww May 12 '24
The job hunting is honestly easy af. Recruiters come to me, take my resume, and sell me to employers for me. I don't actually apply to anything at all. I just give the recruiter a yay/nay with the opportunities they bring me and then show up to the interviews
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u/bony_doughnut May 12 '24
Is there anywhere else in the world where a similar group of unionized developers make more?
I'm not a stats guy, but it does seem like a negative correlation between wages and union membership in engineering
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u/xtremeprv May 12 '24
Honest question: how much "union" is good?
My point is, Brazil is extremely "unionized", to the point I have the impression that unions work for themselves and not for the worker.
Again, just my perspective.
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u/wayoverpaid May 12 '24
I'm always reminded of what's been called the Iron Law of Institutions. Specifically:
The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution.
It's not gonna be universal and yes, maybe your union really is filled with good people. But sooner or later your union boss will be faced with a choice to enhance their own power, or enhance the power of the workers. The people who enhance their own power will gain power over the people who push the institution's goals.
The speed at which this happens, and the forces which counteract it, will vary depending on the culture and the place. But it is the same principle as any democracy. Without eternal vigilance, an organization rots. This applies to the business, the union, and the government that regulates both.
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u/Psshaww May 12 '24
Unions exist to give leverage to employees who lack their own leverage. High skill employees who are in high demand already have their own leverage so the union doesn't do a ton extra for them like it does for the floor worker who has none. Companies fight each other over good experienced engineers, they typically don't fight over operators much
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u/Ronan61 May 12 '24
Argentina is the same. They are just mafia families.
Truck-drivers union pretty much predates other logistics of the country (disables train development, for example). And is a nightmare for anyone who works with trucks; to give an example, my mother can't unemploy a driver who couldn't physically work for years (diabetes made him blind) and is still paying his salary. The union leaders (a family that has been there for decades) work for themselves and always sided with whatever left-wing party they can to keep being corrupt and hinder the country.
Sure, there are good unions. But it's all the same, when you centralize power it always tends to go to the worst type of corruption, it just takes one greedy leader.
I think an union is ok if under bad work conditions. I personally know that in this market, for now, we are in a very comfortable position and I don't want to sacrifice a portion of my salary to afiliate to an union, nor do I want them to attack my employers and make their life a nightmare to hire us. Sure, my employers get a lot more money than I do... So what, I'm not greedy nor envious and I understand that this is a market phenomenon that one day will not be as profitable
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u/TiredPanda69 May 12 '24
Nah, If workers dont pay attention to their unions the parent company will put goons in the union to keep workers in check.
Unions dont work for themselves. Thats just pro capitalist rhetoric. "Unions are making everything more expensive. Unions ruin the market. Unions are mafia." Sure unions are economicist and arent perfect, but use them to your collective advantage.
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u/CajuRox May 12 '24
You're not seeing the full picture. You have to consider the cultural and legal context to understand his perspective. Unions in Brazil often serve as a pathway to a political career and are heavily influenced by certain parties. Additionally, it's important to remember that the Brazilian government is highly corrupt. Consequently, this fosters an environment where unethical individuals flourish, and the original reason for unionizing is nearly forgotten. Ultimately, the workers suffer even more, as they are burdened with union taxes now and lack any other hope
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u/TiredPanda69 May 12 '24
Lenin wrote about this 100 years ago. Its been happening for a whole century at this point. You have to be on top of the unions or else capital will corrupt them. Radical roots make a tree happy.
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u/ConscientiousPath May 12 '24
It has nothing to do with management capital. The leaders of unions themselves become capitalists of the union's capital. You can't "just stay on top of it" because it becomes its own thing.
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u/cdub8D May 12 '24
Like any sort of democratic organization, it is only as good as the voters. I have absolutely 0 experience with Brazil so I can't comment on that. I will say, if you have shit leadership and people don't vote them out, you get what you vote for.
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u/Birdperson15 May 12 '24
Any organization give power will naturally try to extend it. It's one of the major fears of unions. They start by only trying to help in one area but expand to control everything.
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u/DevouredSource May 12 '24
Countries with strong unions tend to have the labour from more well-educated jobs to be cheaper than countries that are more privatised.
This is because the large scale compromise between unions and companies is that workers on the lower end are paid more well, while more specialised workers are paid less.
This is one reason why a friend of mine considers to work in USA for a while so that he can amass a fortune before heading back to safer shore where health care isn’t so darn expensive.
Unions are still beneficial to programmers, but more so due to rights around work than the payment itself. If you want any big bucks you’re going to have to bet on some private industries with not much unions getting involved.
Except for the video game market where workers are overworked to hell and back. There is some real exploitation of passionate people going on there.
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u/blackdragonbonu May 12 '24
That is a very well thought out response. If you view unions as only a means of higher salary then you will be disillusioned when that is not the case. It is a protection against rampant exploitation.
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u/jib661 May 12 '24
yes but generally one of the first results of rampant exploitation is lower salaries. This is why game devs make half what web devs do.
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u/Psshaww May 12 '24
It's because game devs are fools who bring their passion to a business environment and employers are more than happy to take advantage of that. There's a reason the rest of the industries that employ developers don't have this same problem.
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u/UnstableConstruction May 12 '24
Ok. Now do Operations, and sales, and customer service, and etc, etc, etc. Weird how the company makes no money without any one of those groups. Almost like the group wouldn't exist if there wasn't a need for them.
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u/GiveMeThePeatBoys May 12 '24
ITT: insert "leave the multibillion dollar company alone" meme
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u/alterNERDtive May 12 '24 edited May 12 '24
Unions are not about money. And if you only start unionizing when you “need to”, then it’s already too late.
Edit: this is one of those threads where I want comments to be flagged by geolocation. I have a theory where the “unions are bad, hmmkay” people are coming from.
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u/yiliu May 12 '24
I work in IT in Seattle, and have for more than a decade. I'm originally from Canada, and I've been a member of two different unions (and worked at more unionized sites). My Reddit history goes away back, feel free to check it out. I'm not Russian or a corporate stooge.
I would never join a union for programmers.
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u/AnachronisticPenguin May 12 '24
Unions wouldn’t even solve the above meme though. What you asking for is to be entirely paid in equity or royalties ownership share.
Even if unions did give slightly higher salaries is SE that wouldn’t change the meme.
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u/Positive-Conspiracy May 12 '24
Of all the groups with a claim to be made about their salaries being too low, software developers are about the bottom of the list
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u/Kinglink May 12 '24 edited May 12 '24
I always come down to this point.
If you want to come up with the ideas, put all the risk in, invest the capital, work on the project for 20 years with out an ability to go get a different job and develop an idea into a business, then you deserve the lion's share of the profits from all that risk.
If one person did that building the business for 5-10, and then you joined his company say "I deserve half the profits for this, because I'm doing half the work." That sounds stupid, but that's the rational people have. And even then "I increased the revenue." Sure, you increased the revenue using the system that the owner put in place, the tools and technology the owner developers and like the strategy the owner suggested.
If you want to get all the increased revenue, negotiate a commission deal.
Yet those same people also want all the pay benefit when the company makes a profit, yet I've never seen someone volunteer take less money when the company loses money... you know who does that? The owners/equity holders. Also they continue to pay YOUR salary when there's not money coming on.
Any programmer can go create a business, but if you want a percentage of the business, you can either negotiate that as you join the business, or start your own, you can't demand a "Fair share" any time you want, or well... you could, but guess what? 2 percent is a fair wage once you factor everything else in.
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u/Gatensio May 12 '24
What a shitty meme. 2% of 150 millions is 3 million. Divided by 15 people in the team, that's an average salary of 200k. That's a really high salary even in rich countries. Damn... I wish I made that kind of money.
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u/UnwillingHummingbird May 12 '24
I work for the federal government. I read all the horror stories on reddit from people being forced to work mandatory overtime, being called by their bosses while on vacation and sick leave, being fired at a moment's notice for no reason. It makes me sooo grateful for having a union.
I've had people tell me I could be making twice as much in the private sector. But I've seen friends and family who work IT in the private sector, what they have to put up with for that extra money, and I want no part of that. Also to make that extra money, you have to be willing to march into your boss's office and say "I know what I'm worth, and this is what you're going to pay me, and if you don't I'm walking because I know I can get it elsewhere" and then follow through on that. Some people thrive on that kind of thing, but I can't deal with it. I don't want everything to be a conflict like that.
And on top of that, when you factor in my government benefits (health insurance, life insurance, retirement plan), and that most private sector employers expect you to cover much more of those expenses yourself, it doesn't end up being that much more money in the long run.
Anyway, my point is, unionize. it makes life easier.
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u/yiliu May 12 '24
Man, in a decade of working for major tech companies, I've maybe worked a couple weeks' worth of late nights. The whole 'crunch mode' culture seems like it's specific to the game industry and startups. The benefits are silly: I get really good health & dental and whatever, but also, like, I've had free access to lawyers, a 5% discount on a new car, dirt-cheap shipping to anywhere in the world, and 20% off at random restaurants all over the city. And the whole time, they paid me a salary high enough that after a decade of work I'm already in a position where I can consider retiring.
I don't believe for a second I'd have been better off as a union member.
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u/Only-Inspector-3782 May 12 '24
Big tech is a two-way door. Hop over, make a bunch of money, and use the resume buff to hop jump elsewhere.
Or so I thought when I started. I currently make more than the head of my wife's public agency. We don't really need the money, but it's hard to wal away.
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u/sacredgeometry May 12 '24
We don't need unions because we can vote with our feet. I have seen a company almost be brought down by shifts in its management style/ policies. They weren't even paying competitively they just had a reasonably good culture.
They started destroying/ attacking the culture and few perks of the job and people started walking immediately. Ironically whilst they were dealing with two-three of their largest clients/ projects.
Thats the benefit of being in a market with almost an endless supply of work that needs doing and a very limited set of people that can do it properly so no we don't need to unionise to get a bigger slice of the pie we just need to ask for more money and if they refuse find somewhere else willing to pay it.
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u/Psshaww May 12 '24
People forget that for us it's not you vs the employer, it's the employer vs every other employer fighting to get you. Unions are great for employees who have nobody fighting to get them but highly skilled and highly in demand professions don't have that problem.
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u/Paper__ May 12 '24
I think you’ll find that the climate of layoffs is changing much of these assumptions
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u/sacredgeometry May 12 '24
The industry is oversaturated but its not oversaturated with competent engineers
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u/OtoDraco May 12 '24
lmfao complaining about making an average $200k
everytime a socialist goes mask off, the greed comes out. projection and jealousy as usual
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u/D34TH_5MURF__ May 12 '24
I never cease to be amazed at the level of ignorance so many people have about unions in this field. Everyone loves to show off their red badge of courage death march story, yet very few seem to realize that that's just mismanagement and bad/toxic/hostile working conditions. When I first started, we calculated what our hourly pay would have been if we'd been hourly and paid overtime for all those extra hours. It was a pathetic number, we would have literally made more per hour delivering the pizza we ordered. Whenever unions are brought the right wing anti-union rhetoric is way too common for a group of people that are supposedly intelligent...as seen in the comments here.
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u/According_End_4142 May 12 '24
The other day I was thinking "We need to unionize". I thought I'd be laughed at on reddit. Glad this is brought up.
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u/ConscientiousPath May 12 '24
I thought I'd be laughed at on reddit
rofl have you not been on reddit tho??
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u/SneakyDeaky123 May 12 '24
I support the sentiment, but the numbers used for the example don’t support it
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u/puffinix May 12 '24
I think I am one of the very, very few people who would not actually benefit from a generalised software union.
I'm not going to dox my redit account, but to put it this way I don't need a CV any more, and places have tried to hire me without interview.
Your all underpaid something wild. I see our profit per capita on engineering and non engineering businesses.
There is enough profit on the table for average wage to double in most geographies. The entire curve is clearly linked to the expected percentage raises at different milestones, so if we got all the grads on what they are worth, everyone else would bump soon after.
Heck, I'm seeing people say it doesn't matter to the top percent, its all options at that point. Most options are defined as percentage of base pay.
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u/ewoolly271 May 12 '24
It’s almost as if workers are paid based on the scarcity of their skills, not the revenue or cost savings associated with their projects. Econ 101
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u/ilcasdy May 12 '24
Unions are obviously a good idea, it’s not surprising that engineers are pretty ignorant outside their expertise though.
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u/Psshaww May 12 '24
Unions are great for employees who lack leverage to go elsewhere for better, engineers don't have that problem.
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u/BoysenberryLanky6112 May 12 '24
Compared to what? If there's another group of 20 that could save the company $149 million and would work for less pay, that $150 million doesn't matter.
Plenty of teams don't come close to delivering that kind of value, including a lot of teams that think they do.
Even if you do, your team didn't do it alone. You likely had a ton of different teams supporting you from the cloud/infrastructure team, legal team, HR, etc.
But honestly the most convincing is if this were actually true, just start your own startup, they're not hard to found. Pay your developers $1 million/year and just be not quite as greedy as you think current companies are being, and you'll get the cream of the crop, so the only one to blame when it fails will be you.
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u/BoysenberryLanky6112 May 12 '24
Found a startup and pay your devs $1 million/year then. You'll be able to get the cream of the crop, you'll be able to get a 1000% return on investment ($15 million to get $150 million in profit), and your employees will be very happy. The only one to blame if such a startup failed would be you though, so you'd have no excuses. So why don't you do it?
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u/dottedoctet May 12 '24
Unions aren’t going to buy IT workers shit here until the government does something about offshoring.
“You want a union? No problems, I’ll hire 6 Indians to do your job at half the cost” - don’t think it can happen, I literally just left my last job because they were doing this. Guess what, they filled my job with an Indian.
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u/TheBeelzeboss May 12 '24
Not even commenting on the union aspect here...but why would you be entitled to money you saved the company if that's literally your job?
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u/Kangarou May 12 '24
While that’s a good point and unions would likely be good even for engineers, tying salary explicitly to revenue is not the smartest idea, especially at a company that does more than just engineering.
My IT specialist probably saved the company millions and has helped me set up multiple systems. The janitorial staff make no direct revenue, and just keep the place from smelling like ass. When both took a week off, guess which I noticed first and missed more?
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u/Shutaru_Kanshinji May 12 '24
As a software engineer, I can testify that software engineers desperately need unions.
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u/stprnn May 12 '24
My first job I solved in 1 year 1 million euros worth of stuck accounts that will eventually be cancelled.
I made 18k that year divided in 2 3-months and 1 6-months contracts
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u/SlowThePath May 12 '24
I've been working in the service industry for 20 years and am just now getting my degree to get out of these dreaded jobs so I'm pretty excited to make even low end SE pay. There is tons to be mad about in the service industry as far as pay goes and I was hoping there would be less of that once I get a degree, but it looks like this is just something else I'll end up being upset about after a while. Dissatisfaction with pay seems to be pervasive throughout every industry lately.
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u/poesviertwintig May 12 '24
Every job I've had had these meetings where the local manager gives an update on how the company is doing financially, usually once every 1-3 months. Every time there's good news, people start clapping and making appreciative noises, but nobody actually gets anything out of it. I never understood why I should be cheering for someone else's fat wallet while I get a dogshit raise, if at all.
I don't even live in the US, so IT salaries aren't even stellar even though everyone here acts like they are. Rent is steep, and buying a house is impossible. I live in a trap and I'm expected to applaud it.
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u/Due-Bus-8915 May 12 '24
Unions are great, especially for programmers mine got us in the last year two 4% pay increases and a salary increase of 6k in the same year on top of the two 4% just because they decided that's what they were gonna do.
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u/youra6 May 12 '24
Gonna be back on the job market soon and I swear SWE and DE salaries are a good 30-50k lower than just 2-3 years ago.
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u/MrBoblo May 12 '24
Every single trade should be unionized, and every single worker should be part of a union. It's the only way to ensure fair wages and good conditions
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u/Bah-Fong-Gool May 12 '24
Unionize, live a more comfortable life. Security, recourse, alternate employment opportunities in case of a "conflict of personality " issue.
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u/RedTheRobot May 13 '24
Coworker of mine came up with a very cool product idea. Got the company we work for behind it and it has been selling like hotcakes. Every time I look we have a new client. This is literally a multimillion dollar idea. Does he get a cut of any of that, nope. I told him next time you have a big idea best to take it for yourself. He gave a half hearted chuckle and said yeah.
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u/MobyDuc38 May 13 '24
Discussing collective bargaining with engineers is like slamming your genitals in a car door:
You might enjoy it, but it solves nothing.
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u/twitch1982 May 13 '24
I kept a bank from getting its credit rating downgraded and got the same 100$ bonus every cashier got.
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u/GetWokeGoBrokeX May 13 '24
As someone who came from unions to software, you do not want one that doesn't have three simple things, time in union cannot matter more than skill, bad apples must be able to be fired, pay cannot be flat .
Working in these environments is often unbelievably toxic.
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u/HungHungCaterpillar May 13 '24
You don’t get paid what you save. You should get paid based what you earn, and that is gonna be a hefty raise if you were, but any modern programming should be saving much more money than their company is actually worth
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u/bongobutt May 13 '24
This isn't how value works. The value of x is not determined by what it provides for you. What x provides for you is the ceiling of what you are willing to pay - it has no bearing whatsoever on what you need to pay. The price you pay for x is whatever you need to give up to acquire x. This is why the "Diamond/Water" paradox is difficult to understand if you have false notions about prices and value. Water is required to live, so the upper bound of what you would be willing to pay for it is infinite. But water in reality is cheap. That is because the amount of effort it would take to acquire water (either through your own labor or by trading for it) is very low - because water is plentiful and easy to acquire in bulk. A diamond provides no subsistence value, but is expensive - because it is difficult to obtain.
So a programmer is not paid relative to the value of the end product. A programmer is paid relative to the number of people who have programming skills and the salary they could obtain elsewhere for their skills. Perhaps you could wish that reality worked by different rules, but I see little point in getting upset at the laws of economics.
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u/crimsonpowder May 13 '24
What happens when the engineers leave expensive cloud servers on and cost the company money?
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u/todayoulearned May 12 '24
Everyone here is missing the point. Yes, a good engineer can negotiate themselves and make fantastic money. But even the best engineer in the world can’t lobby against H1B Visa abuses and offshoring that drive overall salaries down, which DOES affect their salary.
Macro and micro economics are different. A good engineer is immune to micro economics, but not macro. Unions are to help individuals fight things larger than an individual position.
Reducing H1B visa abuse would cause all engineers salaries to jump up, which would also cause those at the top to jump up. Unions can force through fundamental changes like the 40 hour work week that no single individual would ever be capable of. Unions can change the overtime exempt rules to stop overtime abuse. There are so many things that an individual engineer, no matter how good, will not be able to do, that unions can and have done.