[Discuss] [OT]Discuss - Software Engineering union

[markw at mohawksoft.com (Mark Woodward)]

On 04/19/2012 11:03 AM, Matthew Gillen wrote:
> 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.
That is nice popular conventional wisdom, but not accurate. That is the 
anti-union dialog that has been fed from the business sector to the 
public for decades. Its a nice way to say people should never ever form 
groups to pool their strengths, because that hurts business. Calling 
them a bureaucracy is just another pejorative in the anti-union propaganda.

In fact, your whole paragraph is statement of prejudice against any and 
all unions without a single supporting fact.
> 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.
Again, you imply that a union is an impediment, without fact or 
supportive argument, and then base a subsequent argument upon it.
>> 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.
Some companies are well run. This is true, this has always been true. 
Yet, the 40 hour work week, health insurance, sick days, vacation, 
elimination of child labor are all union accomplishments, and we stand 
to loose many of them because business has been successful to 
controlling the media message: capitalizing on times when when mistakes 
are made by the unions, ignoring when unions help the economy, and lying 
when they can.

> 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.
Well, there is that, but one must ask why they get into that position. 
It takes two to tango. When you have an adversarial relationship between 
an employer and a union, you will find it is the employer that calls the 
union "adversarial." This is just another example of the message being 
controlled by the business. If unions concede on wages and benefits to 
help the business, it is hardly mentioned. When unions strike because of 
pay cuts or loss of benefits, its called "adversarial." If your boss 
walked into your office and said your pay was cut 10% and your insurance 
went up 50%, you'd be pissed off too. Only you'd just leave if you could 
get another job. A union helps fight this nonsense and, in the long run, 
protects companies from their own short sighted idiocy.

>> 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.