This is why we need a programmer union, so that coders can collectively reject reverse-centaur slopwork, like miners rejecting asbestos mines or workers refusing to fix dangerous machines while it’s running.
More political arguments about the other effects of unions aside - I've never heard a good answer for why unions are good for workers in professions with wide ranges of skill and impact, such as lots of types of knowledge work. Do you have an answer for that?
Roles that are more fungible, train drivers, factory workers, I can see the case from the worker's perspective, even if I think there are externalities.
But I can't even see it from a worker's perspective in roles such as software or sales, why would anyone good want to work in an environment where much worse workers are protected, compensation is more levelised etc?
I'm assuming this will boil down to some unspoken values differences but still thought I'd ask.
A union does whatever its members want the union to do. I'd argue that an environment where pay negotiation is a case of every person for themselves isn't actually good for anyone but if the majority of members disagree with me then the union won't get involved in pay. If they wanted to they could scope the union's responsibility purely to being notified of budget reductions/redundancies and given a seat at the table when working out how to handle them.
A union works best when workers see they are all in it together. There are lots of unions, but it is much harder for them to be powerful when members see defecting as helping them. There is a reason unions are most common in labor areas where everyone is the same. You can't be a better bus driver than someone else (either you are bad enough to fire or you are as good as everyone else). The assembly line is as good as the worst/slowest person on it, so there is no advantage in being faster at putting bolts in, or whatever you do (unions can sometimes push safety standards, but also comes from others who have the union take credit)
> The assembly line is as good as the worst/slowest person on it, so there is no advantage in being faster at putting bolts in, or whatever you do [...]
I guess you have no experience with assembly lines?
> (unions can sometimes push safety standards, but also comes from others who have the union take credit)
> In economics, a normal good is a type of a good for which consumers increase their demand due to an increase in income, unlike inferior goods, for which the opposite is observed. When there is an increase in a person's income, for example due to a wage rise, a good for which the demand rises due to the wage increase, is referred as a normal good. Conversely, the demand for normal goods declines when the income decreases, for example due to a wage decrease or layoffs.
That explains fairly well, why rich countries all have more-or-less similar health and safety standards despite very different histories and especially histories of labour activism, and why poor countries fare worse in this respect--even if some of them have laws on the books that are just as strict.
> I guess you have no experience with assembly lines?
I've spent a few weeks on one, so not zero, but not a lot.
Note that I simplified greatly a real assembly line, and there are lots of different lines with different configurations. Nearly everything is multiple lines. There are often buffers along the way so that you can get ahead of the line by a little (or if you need to use the restroom the line continues). Sometimes there are two people in a station with the understanding that if both are perfect they are 80-90% busy (or some such number), but if someone is slow the other can help up. Lines often go slower than possible because of safety. There are likely more issues, but there is a point where the line is waiting on the slow person.
I'm not a great expert on assembly lines, to be honest. But two things:
- From theoretical considerations (less important): you can be better not just by improving average speed, but also by reducing variance (ie being more reliable) and improving quality.
- A practical consideration (more important): from what I recall, even people on assembly lines are often paid piece rates. Ie they are paid more or less proportional to their output. Assuming companies aren't complete idiots, we can assume that they have a good reason for rewarding individuals for higher output? That seems to be in at least mild contradiction to "The assembly line is as good as the worst/slowest person on it, [...]"
> A union does whatever its members want the union to do.
Just like a democracy does whatever its voters want it to do?..
Different people want different things.
> I'd argue that an environment where pay negotiation is a case of every person for themselves isn't actually good for anyone but if the majority of members disagree with me then the union won't get involved in pay.
Well, I feel for the minority that doesn't want the union to get involved in their affairs.
Not a developer, but close enough: so that 'good' stays 'good' and doesn't become 'expected'. Or, said another way, I can enjoy protections too. Automation allows us to do more, actually doing more isn't necessary: remember the tools/why they were made. Yet expectations continue to ride an escalator.
I don't know why one would want to maintain a system of 'look how high I can still jump after all these years, reward please'. Again, expectations: they rise faster than the rewards.
The adversarial framing with coworkers is confusing, discipline is a different matter from collective bargaining.
> why would anyone good want to work in an environment where much worse workers are protected
The "much worse workers" are the majority. That's why you see everyone complaining about technical interviews and such - those of us who crush the interviews and get the jobs don't mind.
Yeah I'm not worried about my ability, but the perceived value from employers. We're probably in the sweet spot where we're still "young" but also very experienced.
That would be quite ridiculous in my opinion. Most of my peers hardly stay in one job for more than 2-3 years anyway, so unless you're retiring in the next two years I don't see why they would have a problem with it.
Of course I live in a country where retirement savings isn't your employer's responsibility. I think the US has some ridiculous retirement practices that may make older employees a bit of a hot potato situation?
I'm not really commenting on that, I'm saying the practice is good for me as an interviewee.
However I do think it's a good way to filter candidates. I should clarify that what I'm talking about is fairly basic programming tasks, not very hard leet code style DSA type tasks. I've never been given an actually hard task in an interview, they've all been fairly simple tasks like write a bracket tax calculator, write a class that stores car objects and can get them by plate number and stuff like that. Helped a friend do a take-home one where we fetched some data from spacex's api and displayed it in a html table.
Every time I do these, people act like I'm Jesus for solving a relatively simple task. Meanwhile I'm just shocked that this is something my peers struggle with. I would have honestly expected any decent dev to be able to do these with roughly the same proficiency as myself, but it turns out almost nobody can.
That's why I think it's a good way to test candidates. If you're going to work as a programmer you should be able to solve these types of tasks. I don't care if you're frontend, backend, finance, healthcare, data science, whatever kind of programming you normally do, you should be able to do these kinds of things.
If someone can't then by my judgement they don't really know programming. They may have figured out some way to get things done anyway but I bet the quality of their work reflects their lack of understanding. I've seen a lot of code written by this kind of people, it's very clear that a lot of developers really don't understand the code they're writing. It's honestly shocking how bad most "professional software developers" are at writing simple code.
In theory you could limit the scope of the union to not include things like negotiating salary or defending workers from being fired. I don't think anything prevents you from having a union that just fights for basic rights like good chairs, not having to review AI slop and not being exposed to asbestos.
Of course keeping the union narrowly focused is an issue. Unions are a democracy after all
> Of course keeping the union narrowly focused is an issue. Unions are a democracy after all
Yep, and I don't want my neighbours to vote on the colour of my underwear or what I have for breakfast either. They can mind their business, and I can mind mine.
AI generated code is threatening the whole tech industry while also threatening to hurt tons of users, because people that have no business in building and deploying apps suddenly feel like they can. That Tea app was a good example for that, endangering thousands of women by leaking private conversations and address data.
If AI slop infiltrates projects enterprises are built upon, its likely companies and their customers are metaphorically hurt too, because of a spike in outages etc... (which already happens given AWS got like 7000 outage reports after getting rid of another 14000 employees).
Yes AI can be cool, but can we stop being this blind regarding its limitations, usecases, how its actually used, how it actually benefits humanity, and so on? Like give me a valid reason for Sora existing (except for monetizing attentionspans of humans, which I consider highly unethical).
Funny the app that was made to destroy other peoples lives with anonymous tips that could be fake, hurt the real perpetrators. Almost like it was karma
Reply intended to user zwnow who is banned by HN, so I cannot reply directly.
You confuse intent with reality. The social software under discussion was abused immediately for the criminal purpose of spreading falsehoods about men, both with malicious intent and wilful negligence, which is particularly egregious because the victims were not made aware of the slander. Even if they wanted to defend themselves, they were prevented from doing so because of the institutionalised sexism, men are banned from participating on grounds of their sex alone. The proof for this is in the leaks. You failed to take this into account and hence got downvoted into oblivion, not for the reason you claim.
The other facts you write about are part of a different narrative, they are not directly relevant to kanwisher's proposition.
IMO, we should not have any tolerance for platforms that are designed for gossip because of the boy-cries-wolf effect in backlash because it means if a woman is a genuine victim, people will take the priors into account and most will assume she's a liar, too, and this lets the perpetrators off the hook. I do not want to live in such a society. The way out of this is holding women accountable, they should be punished for criminal behaviour with immediate and drastic consequences, and tenfold so for their enablers. The problem would stop overnight.
That's not what I wrote. You know that, I know that you know, and you know that I know.
If you can't have a conversation with a modicum of respect, then GTFO HN. We don't need pages filled with pretence and stupid arguments that go nowhere and change no one's mind.
Okay, can you avoid comparing a company going bankrupt because of a bad bet on AI, to a person getting mangled and crushed into a cube inside of an industrial machine?
No. Programmer unions are going to shrink the economy and make the current job market a permanent trajectory instead of a cyclical one.
I can’t think of why the idea of unions is gaining popularity in some programmer circles, other than that its advocates simply don’t have economic common sense.
