Time to unionize.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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Too many dudes who think their special and irreplaceable sadly.
if we unionize I may not get raises!
Employees are more threatened by the prospect of offshoring and H-1B replacement labor than by their egos. Unlike cops or plumbers who can't be easily replaced by remote teams abroad, tech workers face the real risk of being replaced. Strong unions exist across many industries precisely because workers naturally form them to protect their interests and to preserve their way of life.
The 'tech bro' mentality is no different from ego in any other profession. Unionization isn't about eliminating individual personalities, but about collective worker protection.
It's bullshit for companies to lay people off and retain H1Bs. The government shouldn't approve any new H1Bs for development positions until companies stop the layoffs and the amount of developers searching for work goes down significantly.
The whole purpose of the H1-B program is to deter American tech workers from unionizing and to undercut their legitimate demands for a slice of the pie. It should be shut down. Those tech bosses constantly yap about how much they believe in markets, let them deal with real market forces without the government giving them this huge subsidy at the expense of their staff.
tech workers face the real risk of being replaced
Having spent much of my career working alongside H1-B holders, an employer would have to be delusional to think that the quality of education of the average H1-B holder is comparable to that of someone from a good US or European university. There's not even much assurance that the H1-B holder actually took the exams for the degree they purport to hold. And many of the universities are little better than trade schools.
Also, disempowered workers temporarily enslaved to their employers are never going to innovate like free people. They're forced to be yes-(wo)men in order to survive and pay off the corrupt middlemen who got them their jobs. Megalomaniac CEOs might be OK with that, but that's not how you get the Next Big Thing. That's how you milk the idea your founders had two decades ago.
Since unions are about common interest and ideally orthogonal to ideology, I'll add that my subjective interest, as someone living in Russia, is that US tech workers were offshored and/or replaced by immigrants. Because that will long-term weaken the US as an aggressive nation, by losing qualifications.
At the same time if US tech unionized, that could mean weakening the incentive for that aggressive behavior, and weakening big companies.
Hard to decide really. Basically the only bad variant is if it's half-done, enough unionization to stabilize, but also not too much so that they'd still have enormous foreign labor resources. That would mean very powerful corporations and no change in politics.
ideally orthogonal to ideology
I couldn't disagree more. Ideology and economic relations go hand in hand.
Unions' power is in being inclusive. Ideology makes divisions.
When’s the second best time to plant a tree
They'll just move the office to Austin.
I’ve been a software engineer for almost 10 years now and lately, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to doing something else. I went into the field because coding and computing in general are genuine passions of mine but I find it difficult to be the code mill I’m expected to be, especially when getting work done quickly is prioritized over getting it done correctly. I also feel like most of the coworkers I’ve had over the years don’t have any genuine interest or intrinsic motivation, and are just in it because it pays well - which I don’t fault them for, especially in the current economy, but they’re much more likely to put up with being treated like shit.
I just don’t know what else I would do. Teaching high school CS seems fun but I’m pretty sure making that transition would take a couple years, since I gotta get a teaching degree and be a student teacher and all that, and I’m not sure I have the patience for that
You’ve nailed it. 15 years of experience here.
Scrum messed everything up too - lots of less-technical people needed jobs in software and that’s where they tend to slot in.
We would do better to think one level of hierarchy higher than the context we’re in more of the time. Doesn’t seem to be much appreciation for holism and design patterns (your mileage with the latter can vary of course).
Elegance is down and writing your own shitty code instead of using decent opinionated frameworks is up. Because people hate reading code.
If I’m frustrated I write code outside of work.
I tend to look for roles where there is serious, vertically integrated ownership of the code over time.
Spaghetti (or lasagna) is common and I can deal with it, unless the team worships the “clever” maniac who wrote it.
The one specific thing that will cause me to leave is micromanagement.
Thinking about moving closer to bare metal where there is less room for cruft and genuine tradeoffs have to be considered.
Scrum messed everything up too - lots of less-technical people needed jobs in software and that’s where they tend to slot in.
We do what we need to do, and if any humanities major with a Scrum background questions it, we tell them "we're being a self-organizing team, just like the Agile Manifesto calls for."
unless the team worships the “clever” maniac who wrote it
I love getting rid of those people. There has never been a downside from doing so.
I find it difficult to be the code mill I’m expected to be, especially when getting work done quickly is prioritized over getting it done correctly.
Same. Half the time the code base is an indicipherable, spaghetti filled dumpster fire. More often than that, the business plan is either non existent or just plain idiotic. Management can't even answer basic questions like, "who is going to pay for this?" The last three projects I worked on were DOA because there was no clear path to profitability. This was at large, well established corporations.
I'm still trying to figure out how it's possible to graduate with an MBA without understanding the inherent need for revenue to exceed expenses.
Industrial automation is always looking. Don't underestimate the satisfaction of watching your code produce something tangible in front of your eyes.
Just be prepared to integrate with 40 year old equipment and add new features in to a PLC that should have been decommissioned a decade ago and the program is a mangled Frankenstein piece of shit made by 50 different people, many with no real understanding of programming or how to structure things...oh, and various "temporary" hacks upon hacks to keep production running with minimal downtime.
Those things happen, but if they're the norm for you, seek different employment.
i am in a similar position. i have started to give serious thought to the idea of moving back home (to a country with a much lower cost of living than the US), and live from savings while i figure out what i want to do the rest of my life.
I think you can teach at community college without a teaching degree. You might need a master's though.
I have a CS degree but started out in nuclear power, then that got me into automation and robotics. There's way more of that take your time to do it right atmosphere, and these jobs are all over hiding in unexpected places. I guess nobody wants to turn on an expensive machine just to have it eat itself because of a software bug lol.
Google today is what IBM was to the early 2000s.
10,000 Shakespeares with typewriters doing the work of one monkey.
Nobody competent who's early in their career would go into one of those bloated rent-seeking firms. They'd be looking for an interesting startup.
It's funny that not too long ago getting a FAANG job right out of college was a recipe for success. Now many grads would prefer to avoid them because they're so toxic, but can't find a job and have to apply anyhow.
I'm kind of LMAO because of course those places have turned into that. Look who runs them and look at the execs running it. These are not college grads literally living there and need to unwind while at work.
A lot of software companies especially the new ones who want young talent are running exactly the same as startups were 20 years ago just a lot more flashy and newer toys.
I wonder if it's inevitable that anywhere with enough humans working together will reach this point eventually?
No, not really. Where I work now is fantastic and we have great leadership. The moment your original visionary leader leaves and someone with an MBA gets in their place, it all goes to shit. This is LITERALLY what happened to Google and to Apple. Both super dynamic companies with great culture who were then gutted to generate shareholder value.
When money and power are funneled to the few then yes. Something more cooperative or democratic probably wouldn't have the same intensity of the problem.
I think it's only inevitable because of how our society is structured.
From what I’ve seen it starts with a few people who abuse the niceties, or the first downturn, or both, and suddenly they’ve got an excuse to strip it all back.
It’s always one or the other that starts it. You have an office game console and someone brings their kids who spill pop on it or they take the games home. You get that guy who takes a box of snacks home and the CEO complains for like 2 years about it. You get someone who orders pay per view on a business trip. Etc.
Once you get to like 300 employees this threshold starts getting reliably exceeded.
Since when is a 300 person company a startup? I feel like you lose any claim to that long before you hit 100.
Yeah, but that’s the size where things definitely start dying.
50 is probably my ideal company size.
I posted a similar comment in another post of this article.
The elite 1% students who spent their lives pursuing this are getting exactly what they asked for. They sold their souls for a big paycheck and assumed that it was everyone else's careers that were volatile. They'd have done better to work for a non-profit where at least they could say that they are making the world a better place.
It must be nice living in your imaginary world where everything is black and white.
What?
This has always been the case for decades and not even close to a new thing.