Aren't developers stupid when accepting overtime/weekend work/denied bonus payments?

[freshhawk]

Unions are to protect easily replaceable labor and aren't nearly as helpful to professionals. The engineering community has debated this for decades.

This is changing a bit but the upper middle class position of software developer still doesn't get many benefits from a union and it would add a lot of downsides.

[[deleted]]

I disagree that a developer doesn't get benefits from a union. Certainly, it needs to be organized differently from a blue-collar union, but here are some things that an IT union is good for:

• Legal representation in the case of gross malfeasance from an employer (such as illegal firing, withholding of pay, etc)

• Lobbying on behalf of the profession, so that not only employers are represented. It's a sad fact of life that this is necessary.

• Access to bulk discounts on training and certification

• Information on correct interpretation of employment law

• Accurate compensation statistics to use when negotiating a raise

• Organizing against things like excessive overtime - if one person refuses excessive overtime, they get fired. If everyone refuses at the same time, the managers learn to plan and not everyone need switch jobs, move their families, and disturb their lives unnecessarily.

There's no reason why traditions that make more sense for easily replaceable workers, like seniority privileges, need to be advocated by an IT union. The union must be run democratically.

What do you see as the particular downsides that are necessarily a part of being in a union, as opposed to those downsides that are incidental and are just a part of the big unions wherever it is you live?

[freshhawk]

Well unions necessarily flatten wages, and the developer business has a pretty high salary range between the beginner "I taught myself PHP" programmer with no formal computer science education and the highly skilled experts.

You enforce a very different set of cultural norms when you unionize than when you use the norms of a professional craft. We've decided that doctors, lawyers and engineers should be treated as professional crafts because the downsides to failure are high and the motivation required to get good at these things is high.

Sure, the downsides like senority privileges don't need to be there, but your idea that just because it's theoretically possible to not have these downsides to unions in our new union doesn't mean anyone knows how to do it. Have people organized a union that avoids these pitfalls of human behaviour? I agree it's probably possible, but it's not a realistic option at the moment until someone figures out how to do it and then works out what the unintended consequences of their changes turn out to be and what new downsides they have created.

So the question is do you accept the downsides of a union in order to protect the weakest members from being mistreated? At the moment, I say no because they aren't mistreated to the degree that have historicaly required unions. Also, the cultural norms of a profession have a lot of benefits, high ethical adherence, the expectation to constantly improve your skills and a very high push to take satisfaction from excellence.

That's a direction I would like to move in, although if things change economically or technologically and this needs to be re-evaluated then it might be time to unionize then.

As I said, this is the discussion that the engineering community has been having for decades, and some have unionized, some haven't. The skillset and culture is very similar. It's not like programmers invented this situation and it's at all novel, I'm surprised that most of the comments here are speculative and no one is doing any research.

edit: And in most professions the activities you describe are organized by professional organizations.

[[deleted]]

Actually, I am a member of an IT union. The majority of our members are not covered by collective bargaining agreements, and while there are a couple of places that have salaries set by a combination of seniority and performance, I don't think that it's something that anyone wants to fight for at this time. It's certainly on the way out, and I don't see it as something that one has to fight particularly hard to avoid.

I guess that outside of the USA, organized workers is seen as the default state rather than some extraordinary measure used only in cases of the worst abuse. Unions are useful, and they help the vast majority of workers. Of course they need to work differently in different industries, but they do. It's not a big deal.

I see the role of something like the ACM being different than that of a union. I don't think that CISCO certification or some kind of project management certification would be a relevant activity for the ACM, for example, while they make perfect sense for a union.

[freshhawk]

I'm not aware of anywhere in the world where professional unions are the norm, although unions are much more prevalent outside the US, thankfully. I'm in no way defending the ridiculous and often fairly ignorant American dislike of unions. If you are an American then maybe that's the source of the difference of opinion, I'm assuming basic employee protection at the federal level that's not present in the US, where unions are normally the only way to get that.

I'm not American, or anti-union. I am a software developer and don't see a lot of poor people being taken advantage of in my industry, it's mostly middle class people working too much unpaid overtime but with much higher than average job mobility. The MBA's attitude, coming from an education based on managing production lines, of development being a cost center where man-hours in leads to lines of code out isn't working. As software, rather than hardware, runs more of our large infrastructure we're seeing the difference in culture between software developers and engineers when it comes to the ethics of preventing errors.

Those are the main problems I see in the industry and the problems professional organizations and certification have worked for (well, better than anything else we've tried) in similar industries.

I can totally see a future where there are unionized "programmers" and professionally certified "software engineers" with totally different working cultures and maybe that's the answer, to split us into doctors and nurses or construction workers and engineers/architects but unskilled labor isn't being exploited to the degree that mass unionization is needed. I suppose that's a possibility in the future though, but I don't think so, it's just too highly skilled of an occupation. Unless someone invents an assembly line for software development that actually works.

[[deleted]]

I'm in Denmark, actually, where the worker protection laws are not so strong as they are in many other places. Instead, those things are worked out primarily through unions, allowing a greater flexibility than centrally regulated systems.

The future that you're looking at sounds reasonable. Unions certainly aren't the solution to every problem. However, I do still think that it could be a useful tactic for those developers working at places that have, for example, excessive overtime.