Let the death of the programming industry as a respectable professional job be a warning to centrist workers in other industries what happens when you don’t unionize and just assume your personal talent will always be rewarded by the ruling class.
It won’t.
Also let the rhetoric computer programmers use to defend the intrinsic value of their livelihood be a lesson to all of us. They talk in terms of raw productivity, in terms of securing a living wage through being more savvy than people who are dumb and take manual labor jobs. They speak about the threats of automation with COMPLETE confidence it will only be used by their bosses to create more jobs for people like them.
Finally, let it be a lesson that the confidence of programmers who look at AI/LLMs and think “they can never replace me with that, it would be a disaster” totally misses the point that it doesn’t matter to the ruling class of the tech world that replacing tech worker jobs with shitty automation or vastly more underpaid workers won’t work longterm. The point is to permanently devalue and erode the pride and hard fought professionalism of programming (Coding Bootcamps have the same objective of reducing the leverage of workers vs employers).
^ Programmers make a classic person-who-is-smart-at-computers mistake here of trying to understand business like it is a series of computer programs behaving rationally to efficiently earn money
I have met a nauseating amount of programmers who truly believe that tech companies would have to come crawling back to them if they fired tech workers in the industry en masse and everything began to break. What these programmers don’t understand is yeah, they will come back, but they will employ you from the further shifted perspective that you are an alternative to a worthless algorithm or vastly underpaid human when they do. That change in perspective, that undercutting of the “prestige” of being a skilled programmer is permanent and will never revert.
Shit is dark… but also damn if I don’t have a tiny bit of schadenfreude for all the completely unfounded self confidence and sense of quiet superiority so many people who work with computers project when doing something like teaching a classroom of 20 kids or fixing someone’s plumbing problem is way fucking harder any day of the week.
First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.
And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now. There is no growth vector but loads of people who aren’t producing value (not their fault, there is nothing to produce). Of course, better protection for employees is always needed, but as someone who watched an european company reduce its workforce from 110k people to 19k over the course of 3 years in early 2010s, i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
This is what we’re seeing now: the work is simply not needed.
First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.
"There are several ways that unionization’s impact on wages goes beyond the workers covered by collec-
tive bargaining to affect nonunion wages and labor practices. For example, in industries and occupations
where a strong core of workplaces are unionized, nonunion employers will frequently meet union
standards or, at least, improve their compensation and labor practices beyond what they would have
provided if there were no union presence. This dynamic is sometimes called the “union threat effect,”
the degree to which nonunion workers get paid more because their employers are trying to forestall
unionization.
There is a more general mechanism (without any specific “threat”) in which unions have affected
nonunion pay and practices: unions have set norms and established practices that become more generalized
throughout the economy, thereby improving pay and working conditions for the entire workforce. This has
been especially true for the 75% of workers who are not college educated. Many “fringe” benefits,
such as pensions and health insurance, were first provided in the union sector and then became more
generalized—though, as we have seen, not universal. Union grievance procedures, which provide
“due process” in the workplace, have been mimicked in many nonunion workplaces. Union wage-
setting, which has gained exposure through media coverage, has frequently established standards of
what workers generally, including many nonunion workers, expect from their employers. Until, the
mid-1980s, in fact, many sectors of the economy followed the “pattern” set in collective bargaining
agreements. As unions weakened, especially in the manufacturing sector, their ability to set broader
patterns has diminished. However, unions remain a source of innovation in work practices (e.g.,
training, worker participation) and in benefits (e.g., child care, work-time flexibility, sick leave)."
i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
You are not a union, you cannot stop a business from doing anything, together with your fellow workers however you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.
And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now.
Why should an industry bother innovating to increase dividends to shareholders with expensive and risky new technological ventures when it can just keep slashing labor costs and crushing employees under their foot? There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don’t have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.
you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.
no! That’s not how unions work in capitalism. A union can’t decide the business side of things. There’s a clear separation of responsibilities. There are, of course, other types of societies in which workers have this power, but then there’s not real point in debating the role of the union in that completely different context.
There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don’t have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.
Union-lead society wide innovation for the sake of the current workforce is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a while.
no! That’s not how unions work in capitalism. A union can’t decide the business side of things. There’s a clear separation of responsibilities
Ahahahaha right, I love how you just accept the legally defined rights of what a union can do and what it can’t as if those laws in any given country aren’t just a record of the battlefield between the working class and the ruling class. A union can do whatever the fuck a union wants to do, and the law will attempt to constrain it in favor of the ruling class and capitalists to the degree that is politically tenable in a given environment. Sometimes it will be successful, sometimes it will fail, but unions fundamentally exist outside of capitalism because they have a level of legitimacy that capitalism and the idea of owning other people’s labor will never have.
It hardly needs to be said that like libraries, if unions didn’t already exist as a concept there is no way they would be legal at all if they were developed in this day and age. Unions are only ever temporarily legal along limited contexts under capitalism.
Union-lead society wide innovation for the sake of the current workforce is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a while.
high five solidarity my friend, even when you insult my intelligence you are still far more my friend than my boss will ever be
Sorry, i wasn’t aware you were advocating for Anarcho-syndicalism. I thought we were having a conversation in good faith about the current situation. Good luck with your revolution
The rest of us have work to do to end the violence.
I cannot imagine a world without oppression, this is true. However, I grew up long ago in a world where oppression came from those who said they’d overthrow it last time. They were using the same ideas you flaunt around and much like you (or whomever the person I was talking to before was), they had superficial understanding of what they were advocating for.
Sarcasm: Oh well, better just throw our hands up and allow right wing authoritarians to pursue their narrow minded cycles of exploitation and heirarchal domination. /s
Companies like google pressuring governments in India and Mexico to crack down on unions and work protections there is what it looks like for them and limitations on immigration (and the freedoms of those do immigrate).
Free market of labor is never the real source of downward market pressure, IMHO. Its the veryil intentional policies ment to keep labor desperate.
Let the death of the programming industry as a respectable professional job be a warning to centrist workers in other industries what happens when you don’t unionize and just assume your personal talent will always be rewarded by the ruling class.
It won’t.
Also let the rhetoric computer programmers use to defend the intrinsic value of their livelihood be a lesson to all of us. They talk in terms of raw productivity, in terms of securing a living wage through being more savvy than people who are dumb and take manual labor jobs. They speak about the threats of automation with COMPLETE confidence it will only be used by their bosses to create more jobs for people like them.
Finally, let it be a lesson that the confidence of programmers who look at AI/LLMs and think “they can never replace me with that, it would be a disaster” totally misses the point that it doesn’t matter to the ruling class of the tech world that replacing tech worker jobs with shitty automation or vastly more underpaid workers won’t work longterm. The point is to permanently devalue and erode the pride and hard fought professionalism of programming (Coding Bootcamps have the same objective of reducing the leverage of workers vs employers).
^ Programmers make a classic person-who-is-smart-at-computers mistake here of trying to understand business like it is a series of computer programs behaving rationally to efficiently earn money
I have met a nauseating amount of programmers who truly believe that tech companies would have to come crawling back to them if they fired tech workers in the industry en masse and everything began to break. What these programmers don’t understand is yeah, they will come back, but they will employ you from the further shifted perspective that you are an alternative to a worthless algorithm or vastly underpaid human when they do. That change in perspective, that undercutting of the “prestige” of being a skilled programmer is permanent and will never revert.
Shit is dark… but also damn if I don’t have a tiny bit of schadenfreude for all the completely unfounded self confidence and sense of quiet superiority so many people who work with computers project when doing something like teaching a classroom of 20 kids or fixing someone’s plumbing problem is way fucking harder any day of the week.
First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.
And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now. There is no growth vector but loads of people who aren’t producing value (not their fault, there is nothing to produce). Of course, better protection for employees is always needed, but as someone who watched an european company reduce its workforce from 110k people to 19k over the course of 3 years in early 2010s, i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
This is what we’re seeing now: the work is simply not needed.
"There are several ways that unionization’s impact on wages goes beyond the workers covered by collec- tive bargaining to affect nonunion wages and labor practices. For example, in industries and occupations where a strong core of workplaces are unionized, nonunion employers will frequently meet union standards or, at least, improve their compensation and labor practices beyond what they would have provided if there were no union presence. This dynamic is sometimes called the “union threat effect,” the degree to which nonunion workers get paid more because their employers are trying to forestall unionization.
There is a more general mechanism (without any specific “threat”) in which unions have affected nonunion pay and practices: unions have set norms and established practices that become more generalized throughout the economy, thereby improving pay and working conditions for the entire workforce. This has been especially true for the 75% of workers who are not college educated. Many “fringe” benefits, such as pensions and health insurance, were first provided in the union sector and then became more generalized—though, as we have seen, not universal. Union grievance procedures, which provide “due process” in the workplace, have been mimicked in many nonunion workplaces. Union wage- setting, which has gained exposure through media coverage, has frequently established standards of what workers generally, including many nonunion workers, expect from their employers. Until, the mid-1980s, in fact, many sectors of the economy followed the “pattern” set in collective bargaining agreements. As unions weakened, especially in the manufacturing sector, their ability to set broader patterns has diminished. However, unions remain a source of innovation in work practices (e.g., training, worker participation) and in benefits (e.g., child care, work-time flexibility, sick leave)."
https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/
https://files.epi.org/page/-/old/briefingpapers/143/bp143.pdf
You are not a union, you cannot stop a business from doing anything, together with your fellow workers however you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.
Why should an industry bother innovating to increase dividends to shareholders with expensive and risky new technological ventures when it can just keep slashing labor costs and crushing employees under their foot? There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don’t have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.
no! That’s not how unions work in capitalism. A union can’t decide the business side of things. There’s a clear separation of responsibilities. There are, of course, other types of societies in which workers have this power, but then there’s not real point in debating the role of the union in that completely different context.
Union-lead society wide innovation for the sake of the current workforce is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a while.
Ahahahaha right, I love how you just accept the legally defined rights of what a union can do and what it can’t as if those laws in any given country aren’t just a record of the battlefield between the working class and the ruling class. A union can do whatever the fuck a union wants to do, and the law will attempt to constrain it in favor of the ruling class and capitalists to the degree that is politically tenable in a given environment. Sometimes it will be successful, sometimes it will fail, but unions fundamentally exist outside of capitalism because they have a level of legitimacy that capitalism and the idea of owning other people’s labor will never have.
It hardly needs to be said that like libraries, if unions didn’t already exist as a concept there is no way they would be legal at all if they were developed in this day and age. Unions are only ever temporarily legal along limited contexts under capitalism.
high five solidarity my friend, even when you insult my intelligence you are still far more my friend than my boss will ever be
Sorry, i wasn’t aware you were advocating for Anarcho-syndicalism. I thought we were having a conversation in good faith about the current situation. Good luck with your revolution
Hey bud, if you cant imagine a world without [oppression] please step aside. The rest of us have work to do to end the violence. We know it’s time.
I cannot imagine a world without oppression, this is true. However, I grew up long ago in a world where oppression came from those who said they’d overthrow it last time. They were using the same ideas you flaunt around and much like you (or whomever the person I was talking to before was), they had superficial understanding of what they were advocating for.
What a boring, tired attempt.
Sarcasm: Oh well, better just throw our hands up and allow right wing authoritarians to pursue their narrow minded cycles of exploitation and heirarchal domination. /s
In fact, organizing non-heirarchal is quite proven. Doing so on a scale we’re discussing, and Truly Breaking the Cycle of the Planetary Work Machine well, see for yourself, there’s more imagining to do.
Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You
Such a long rant about something so old and so universal as outsourcing.
Not even outsourcing, they are internal hires, just elsewhere.
*Class Warfare
FTFY
I’m sure the software engineers in India and Mexico see it differently.
Companies like google pressuring governments in India and Mexico to crack down on unions and work protections there is what it looks like for them and limitations on immigration (and the freedoms of those do immigrate).
Free market of labor is never the real source of downward market pressure, IMHO. Its the veryil intentional policies ment to keep labor desperate.
Yes, Google is to blame for low salaries in India.