Damn, wtf are intuit and GM doing to their engineers?
Maybe they just forgot to brainwash them with anti-union propaganda
This is likely the case with GM given that their manufacturing is unionised. Engineers just got a demo what that can do for them last year. They aren’t getting the raise assembly workers got.
Edit: cause some jackass is implying I’m a bot - I should have joined a union and a union would’ve protected me from the mass layoff in '23 but that doesn’t change that while there I never thought about needing a union because it was such a nice place otherwise.
As someone who previously worked at Google - they didn’t have any antiunion propaganda.
They just, like, paid well, had top tier benefits, great perks, and had a good work life balance.
That’s the other option, of course: If your employees are happy, they don’t need to form a union to press complaints.
That’s my situation at a Silicon Valley tech company. Nobody ever mentioned unions one way or another but I honestly have no idea what I could ask for that I don’t already get. We have good benefits, good perks, everyone works frok home, unlimited PTO that nobody tries to limit or work around (all we are asked for is to give a rough estimate of time we’ll be taking off during each quarter so that it can be factored into planning), good work environment, good pay.
Silicon valley is full of H1B visa holders who can’t speak up politically or risk deportation.
This makes a lot of sense. I can definitely see those companies at the bottom having way more H1B workers than the ones st the top.
And a person with an H1B can only change to a job within a certain radius of their current job and if it’s beyond that radius they need to report it to the govt.
The only workers left at 𝕏itter are H1B ones just trying to survive.
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.
Idk about intuit but GM is probably a result of their union coworkers getting awesome Bennie’s.
The US labor laws need to be updated too. They suck compared to the 1st World EU members. I fully support unions too.
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.
Unless unions work differently where you live, they are a democracy that will pursue whatever issues its members vote on. If members don’t think pay is a problem, why would they try to change it?
Had to explain this to my dad when he told me about the carpenters unions not allowing his brother to work after he retired.
1: Unions are the democratization of workplaces; for better or for worse.
2: Should you really be working when you’re claiming retirement checks from your union?
3: People are often falsely confident on their views about things. People love to complain about the government while hardly understanding anything about it. The same happens everywhere, including unions. Just because some dude is miffed doesn’t mean they have any right to be. They can be misinformed.
Should you really be working when you’re claiming retirement checks from your union?
As a carpenter? Yes and no. It shouldn’t compete with what union people are by and large doing for their steady bread and butter but completely outlawing earning any money is cruel to the type of busy-bees that many tradespeople are. Hand-craft chessboards or something, anything where skill and mastery is eclipsing the industrial aspect. Also teaching, training, and consulting. Retirement should be a role-change (if desired), not a kick to the curb. Also, accommodate for half-retirement: Half the cheque, half the jobs kind of situation.
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.
Yeah the tech labor market has really proven that the idea of employment contracts being negotiated between equal parties isn’t true even in the best of circumstances.
Even when companies are desperate for talent, and willing to spend ridiculous amounts of money on salaries and perks, they are not willing to negotiate on anything outside of that. They still have terrifying contracts with non-compete and damages clauses they could use to wreck your life, no workplace democracy, unpaid overtime and whatever other shit is legal.
But hey! You get free snacks and enough money to buy the dinners you don’t time to cook and save up to survive your inevitable burn out!
When you learn that publicly traded companies are mostly obliged to squeeze as much work from you while paying as little, then all the all the puzzle pieces fall into place and all of what you said starts to make perfect sense.
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”
If this is happening, sounds like you have a shit-ass Product Manager (or no PM).
Signed, not a shit-ass Product Manager
While there are voluntary shit-ass PMs, you can only afford to be not a shit-ass PM because the org isn’t squeezing you for all it can. Once it does, you’d have to make similar decisions. If you quit because you don’t agree with the way things are going, a compliant shit-ass PM will take your place, or no PM, and the people would end up in the place the parent described.
Leadership definitely drives a lot, but even with bad leadership a PM can and should do a lot to help here. I spent 5 of my years of PMing with an operations org that drove every big decision and I still did everything I could to protect my devs. I ended up in major burn out from it multiple times, but I don’t regret it.
Alerts that are waking devs up in the middle of the night have a user impact too, and a PM can and should communicate that impact and risk to the business side as part of why it needs to be prioritized. Alternatively, there might be a reason that the UI change is ultimately more valuable, and it’s the PM’s job to communicate why that is the priority to their devs. If developers with a Product team ever truly believe the reason they’re building something is just “because [insert team here] is excited about it,” then the PM failed at a critical responsibility.
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.
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.
If you want to read about this on a website that isn’t full of ads and doesn’t just present as an ad for their own news app, here is the source material by Blind.com.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find a link to the raw survey data and I generally don’t trust surveys that aren’t accompanied by raw data.
I went looking for the data because 1901 respondents across 32 of the largest companies globally doesn’t seem like it would be statistically representative of any one company. If you assume the same sample size per company, which it probably isn’t but again that’s unverifiable because I couldn’t find the raw data, you’re looking at, what, 60 employees for a company the size of Google?
Look, I’m a recovering tech worker who left the industry because of the toxic work culture, having spent a quarter of my life at one of the good ones. Even there I saw the value of unions. No matter the industry, workers deserve the right to collective bargaining and fair treatment. But I don’t think surveys with unverifiable data help move that conversation forward.
Now, if I’m mistaken and someone finds a source link to the data that we can all verify, I’ll happily take another look and reconsider my opinion on it’s validity.
I think blind itself drives some interesting bias. The public posts are pretty incel. You need a critical mass of folks at your company to have a company private board so it attracts folks from bigger companies. It doesn’t seem to represent average folks well. Unless I have no idea what average is.
I’m not sure what to do with that instinct. The overall results say a thing I wanted to hear. It all feels weird.
My thoughts exactly, I would not trust Blind members to be a statistically representative sample of workers at these tech companies. Blind tends to draw people who aren’t super happy with their job, and may-or-may not be more likely to be interested in unionization.
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
Apple, tesla, and Google suspiciously at the bottom three there
Me too. I work for none of the above, but yes I would.
Not bad, I thought our heads were still further up our asses.
Absolutely. I’ve been laid off twice in my IT career. It would be nice to have someone on my side for a change.
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.
this can’t happen because the kill switch activates after 72 hours and “order 66” initiates, plunging the whole stack into lockdown and the org into absolute chaos.
hope there were backups you strike busting pieces of shit.
don’t fuck with IT professionals. you take away the only fulfillment we get out of life and you will come to personally understand the meaning behind, “there are worse fates than death”
apes strong together.
As much as I love the sounds of that it seems like a good way to get arrested under some anti-hacking laws.
lol. you think any judge or jury is going to understand the nuances of how a kill switch works?
“did you implement a kill switch that harmed my clients interests?” – “I have no idea what you’re talking about, and furthermore had your client not broken anti-union laws and came to negotiations, staff could have been available to identify and resolve the issues your client allowed to happen through their own willful negligence.”
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.
I think the key here is intent. kill switch or not, proving you had the intent to harm is what you’re found guilty of.
can’t prove intent on code that’s had all history wiped from it and sat in prod for several years.
“why does this code exist?” – “IDK” “in your expert opinion why does this exist?” – “I cannot express my expert opinion because of a lack of evidence”
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.
Apple workers is anti union? WTF, i thought apple was one of the most liberal leaning corporations
Apple employees lack class consciousness. They don’t understand that they too are working class, because they too have to sell their labor to survive. You can be pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ+, pro-DEI, etc. while still being oblivious to the class war.
Now how do we do it? Especially with remote work, not sure how to organize.
The same way you organize anything. Start by talking to a couple trusted coworkers to form an organizing committee. All the members of the OC need to talk to coworkers, handle workplace drama, agitate for better conditions, educate people about unions, maintain systematic campaign tracking, and fight against the boss during their union busting campaign. When I worked remotely, it was as simple as sending a dm like this:
Hey, would you be able to talk over break? Some coworkers and I were discussing some issues and I wanted to hear your thoughts.
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.
