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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • “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”

    Classic. Once I landed in a team who’s been woken up every night, often multiple times a night for several years. The people left were so worn down, burnt out and depressed that it was obvious just by looking at them. The company has cut the team to the bone and the only people left were folks that didn’t have the flashy resumes to easily escape. They had drawn up plans to fix the system years ago. BTW, none of that was disclosed to me until I had signed up and showed up for work and asked who are those miserable looking people over there. “That’s your team” the man replied.


  • 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

    These are not the only options. Here are some others:

    1. Ensuring the on-call load is shared more evenly so that everyone is woken up under the painful limit
    2. Fixing the broken shit that keeps waking people up, which they keep ignoring because “it’s low priority”
    3. Hiring people for a night shift, appropriately compensated for their diminished health and other life impacts. The union can ensure such positions aren’t paid the same as normal work hours while not being prohibitively expensive. Night shifts are a standard thing in some occupations

    Something’s telling me most orgs where 2 is an option would go with that. Related to that - increases in labor compensation is what forces companies to spend money on capital investment that increases productivity - read new equipment, automation, fixing broken shit, etc. If there are cheap enough slaves to wake up during the night, doing this investment is “low priority” (more expensive) and isn’t done.


  • That’s not the case the parent was asking about though. They were asking whether they can do more than what’s in their job description. Not whether someone else is obliged to do more.

    I don’t doubt your experience and it’s totally fine by me. That’s how they want to run their workplace, that’s the way they run it. It doesn’t mean you’re gonna make yours like that. It’s unlikely that a software org would be run like that. At the end of the day unions are democratic institutions where their members decide how to do these things. Because of that, your current org would likely be run the way you and your colleagues want to run it. Not in some bizarre way that Las Vegas convention workers do. :D


  • 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.


  • 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.








  • That’s not what capitalism is. Competition is one component that’s observed in capitalist systems and it isn’t strictly required, nor necessarily the natural course of capitalism. There are well established examples in capitalist economies where competition cannot exist naturally. Then you have the history of capitalist economies rife with consolidation, only sometimes impeded by intervention. I’d invite you to consider what happens to the losers in a best case scenario competitive market. What happens with their machinery, workers, brands, market share, etc. once they’re our of business. I’ll say it since I want to draw a conclusion - they typically get absorbed by the successful competitors. Repeat this cycle enough and you get the consolidation we see all around us. What we live in isn’t not capitalism. It’s just a …late… stage of it. The perfect competition model doesn’t prove that it’s a natural or a likely model of economies, there’s no good evidence that competitive equilibria are likely or stable. If reality is any guide, it’s the opposite.



  • Oh yes units like this should be non-market or heavily insulated from the market / regulated, etc. Basically all the things you said.

    As for the quality of units, when I say cheap I don’t mean shitty to live in. For example the current luxury condo units being built are expensive to build but shitty to live in. Money is spent on using flashy materials, trims, ceiling to floor windows that are difficult to insulate and last less. Not on larger units that are comfortable to live in. You get a luxury shoebox. If you look at some buildings from the last century, you can see much simpler construction cheaper materials but 1400 sq ft units that you can raise a family in. I live in one built in the 70s and it’s in perfect shape today. Many families with children live here. That’s what I mean by cheap and durable construction. I guess I should have added the family-sized qualifier. 😄



  • The home you live in is not an investment if you aren’t willing to downgrade. If you live forever in your home, you can’t spend the money you’d get if you sold it because you won’t sell it till you die. If you decide to sell it, and decide you won’t downgrade, that you want an equivalent home, that home will cost approximately the same as what you sold yours for as it would have appreciated in value just like yours. In fact you’d lose the transaction fees. If you wanted to make money you have to buy a cheaper home. That typically means some form of downgrade. Size, type, location, etc. Yet many people don’t understand this and believe that the home they own is an investment and that it going up in price is good for them. All the while their taxes go up with its price along with everything else they buy because everyone else also has to pay higher housing costs. It’s irrational to believe this because it’s simply not true. Therefore I say people believe this due to indoctrination. The process of learnint to believe something without critical examination of its validity. I’m just using the term because I think it fits the bill.

    The home you live in is only an investment if you’re willing to downgrade and you can only collect the upside on the difference in price between what you sell and what you move into. Secondary units are an investment proper. The scenario with classic games is like a secondary property because you don’t need to buy an equivalent in price cartridge when you sell one you have.