[Discuss] [OT]Discuss - Software Engineering union

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

On 4/19/2012 7:28 AM, Mark Woodward wrote:
> I think, in our society, business has been bashing unions for decades
> and their message has taken hold. Yes, I grant you there are many
> examples of absurdity where the unions aren't helping themselves. On the
> whole, however, the amount of good that unions do far outweigh the few
> Monty pythonesque moments.

Just because unions don't always commit egregious stupidity doesn't mean
that there aren't serious costs associated with them.  At their core,
unions are another layer of bureaucracy.  Bureaucracy's foremost goal is
always self-preservation.  That necessarily stands in the way of innovation.

I would argue that in IT, more impediments to innovation are a bad
thing.  Our profession is going through a revolutionary period.  Perhaps
unions wouldn't be as harmful to innovation as our patent system is, but
it would be right up there.

> The IT industry is fairly well paid slave labor. 

I really don't feel that what I do is anything approaching slave labor.
I honestly can't think of a single thing a union would do for me to make
my life better. I value flexibility in my schedule.  My employer is
happy to work with me on that.  I understand the value I provide to the
business, and make sure that I'm doing things that help the business
even if it's not strictly in my job description.

I feel that often unions create an adversarial relationship where
employees no longer feel that the health of the business is their
problem (the automotive unions are the conical example of this).  That
would be detrimental to IT at a time when businesses are completely
re-tooling and re-organizing themselves around IT functions.

> The treatment of IT people is pretty terrible as well.
> 
> I worked at "Business and Professional Software" on Binney Street, 
> ...
> I worked at "Sytron" corporation, they went on a hiring spree...
> 
> At "TPS" in Cambridge, ... 
>
> I think we need a union. Looking back on all the crap that I've seen, I
> hate to think of new people going into this industry without protection.

This might sound callous, but it sounds like you need to be a little
more selective in who you work for.  Voluntary employment is voluntary
on both sides.  If people left a job and got screwed on day one of their
"new job", whose fault is that?  A bird in the hand... More to the
point, how would a union have helped in that case?  As an aside, I've
known far more people that ended up crawling back to their old employers
after doing (short) stints at startups than I've known people who were
successful at startups.

Back to my point though: I interviewed at Progressive Insurance when I
was fresh out of school.  I asked questions about what it was like
working there.  They were gearing up for a big re-write of their
mission-critical software that was written in COBOL and whose lineage
was measured in decades.  They were planning to do it all in C# (.Net
was still in beta at the time).  I'd done some research, and found a
list (from M$) of 10 "key" differences between Java and C#, and they
were all syntactic sugar.  So I asked them why they were using what
appeared to me to be a platform-specific Java for this major project (I
think I refrained from mentioning the "unproven" aspect of .Net, or old
adage that M$ doesn't get anything into a usable state until at least
version 3).

No one could give me a decent answer.  One of them actually admitted
that he was pure manager and had no technical background. But their
reactions told me all I needed to know about working there.  Programmers
would be treated as cogs in a machine.  They would have no input into
any meaningful decisions.  They weren't interested enough in me to make
me and offer, but that was okay, because I was pretty sure I'd hate my
life if I worked there.

By contrast, where I ended up working (had to migrate East for better
opportunities; the job market for IT really sucked at that time in the
mid west) a department manager was asking deeper technical questions
than I think I would have asked at that point.  The first time I met my
current manager, I was running a demo I had designed specifically to
make his product look bad.  Two months later I was working for him.

tl;dr My point is that being selective in who you work for will do far
more for you than a union ever could, and without the bureaucracy.

Matt