OP starts with a typical cute twink post about how they need unions because some of them have been laid off. OP gets called out for being laid off, getting severance, got two job offers (one for $350k, a government job for $150k) in a month and was asking about taking both jobs to be overemployed. He then reveals he got laid off from one of them and the other one rescinded the offer (lol what?).
Some Euro starts talking about how great unions are and how he's in one. Later deletes his account out of shame most likely.
I am part of an union. And unemployment fund.
I highly, highly recommend.
Pay?
Oh lol. 50k @ 4yoe, but you cant straight up compare.
Cost structures are so different between EU and US. That 50k means very comfortable life. Not luxorious, but comfortable.
So you have a worse quality of life than someone in the US with 4 yoe and no union
... Uh, what? :D
Where did you get that "worse quality of life"? Out of your butt?
Because you said comfortable but not luxury. 4 yoe here you're making $150k most places.
QoL is much better in Europe for low wage earners though but not SWEs. It's common for european SWEs to want to move to the states.
That 50k takes you way further here than there.
As I said, you cant straight up compare.
It's just impossible to compare guys..
The average worker does absolutely not make 3x their European counterpart.
"European" is a very broad term. You have places where it's somewhat comparable, but souther down you go, the bigger the gap. From where I am, 40k€ per year is treated as very good, that's what a lot of surgeons make.
Fun fact: unions can include protections against offshoring as part of their negotiations! :D
Any examples of this working out in reality? What's to stop a business owner from shutting down an entire department and offshoring anyway, or paying a 3rd party company for their software instead of hiring devs onshore?
All the unions that have done this successfully in the past?
NBA players have a union that sets a minimum salary of $1.15M, shrug
Also some post with someone claiming to make $750k a year and wanting a union.
Better working conditions? I had ribs for lunch (free), I worked out in the middle of the day for 1.5 hrs, and I left work at 4pm. And I make almost $400,000 a year. No union would ever get me this job, that would only be reserved for the union leaders.
Just wait until the reorg happens, you're put on a team doing something you don't want to do with a manager who doesn't go to bat for you, and pushed with impossible deadlines. Oh, and half your team, many who you've worked closely with and became friends with, got laid off. It would be much better to have consistent working conditions. I make $750k (with free lunch too, whoopty shit) and this career is a fricking rollercoaster
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Code monkeys are the biggest crystrags. Also the biggest bullshitters of their salaries.
Krayon sexually assaulted his sister.
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They were pretty much one upping each other.
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lmao I saw that. Code monkeys always bullshit their salaries.
Krayon sexually assaulted his sister.
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TC includes equity, not just salary.
It's kind of stupid because the stock goes up like crazy and they (we) pretend it's because they're so awesome. Like yeah, all of AMZN's growth over the past 6 years is due to my work, that's why my comp is so high.
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Yeah, I know. I've known some code monkeys to tell people their salary with all benefits included.
Krayon sexually assaulted his sister.
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and right under your comment we have a drama bro with a 500k salary in a cozy position. Do tech cucks really think they're this important?? 😂
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lol always. They are easy to bait.
Krayon sexually assaulted his sister.
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They make less than the hourly wage of Uber eats drivers in new York city
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Sure, but they have VAT in Europe. That makes their 50k go a lot farther than you'd think. You just can't compare, don't even try, okay?
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bongland software devs driving for uber:
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Hey pal, you got a license for that thing?
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I work in tech with Eastern Europeans and literally make 4x what they do lmao. Apparently it's still a great salary for them.
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I had a similar experience lol. Worked with people in Turkey and based on level.fyi they made like 1/3 to 1/4 what I did in a non tech hub with trash salaries for the US.
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Poor strags just don't buy insurance so when they crash their shitbox Ultima into your car you don't get any gap insurance and they just get a measly fine.
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The main reason I don't buy their claims is that commodities like snowboards and graphics cards aren't any cheaper in europe. If I have 2x as much as a euro after bills and taxes, I'm doing way better
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I'm not sure how to put my thoughts into words here but I find that the USA makes it much easier to spend money at every opportunity. We don't have $60/fillet steakhouses in TERF Island either.
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That's why I only buy internationally marketed products so I can always know I have more of them than you
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Europoors hear about some dude with no insurance owing 130k in medical debt and 50k in school debt and just seem to assume all Americans spend half their paychecks on healthcare and education and then are amazed when they visit and poor r-slurs from our second bottom quintile live in a bigger apartment than they do with a 60 inch or bigger TV in every room and a more expensive phone than they have.
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Is it even possible to get 130k medical debt in good faith? Out of pocket limit is like 10k yearly
e: glazed right over "no insurance," didn't think that was a thing
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Virtually all the doom stories about medical debt in the US are people without insurance.
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My company explicitly does not hire in places with strong "worker rights" because it means they can't trim deadweight. I make ~500k at 4.5 yoe, and the job is fairly chill considering the comp.
My starting comp right out of school was 185k. Ironically, that was at a company that got burned by these protections during a layoff cycle, so now they are just expanding in India.
I will never vote for a union or for anything that conflicts with at will employment. I don't want to work with lazy underperformers, and I don't want my comp to be determined by anything other than merit.
Unions are fricking awful unless you do low skill work and are easily replaceable by some other warm body. If you're a SWE and are also pro union, you are literally r-slurred.
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I've been working at a startup for a few years and they stopped giving raises. Got any spare jobs? I put the "full" in full-stack, you'll love me I promise.
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Doxxing yourself to another dramatard is not a great move professionally tbh... but I mean yeah we hire occasionally. Your friendly local tech giant probably pays close to 400k for senior roles though, it's not that hard to find.
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I've only said BIPOC here 35
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one day they'll realize they're actually getting squeezed from every corner possible by they own governments
they get taxed 40%
the company they work for gets taxed 40%
it all goes to pakis and albanians
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I can totally understand that if you're making 750k per year you're probably willing to trade off a decent portion of that for more job security from a union, but having a generic "I want the union to protect me from industry trends and macroeconomic conditions" wish is basically asking the company to commit economic suicide and illustrates why unionized tech firms are so rare in the US.
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This dude is a fricking r-slur. He can literally work for like 5 years, get laid off, and never find another job and have still be better off than some poor butthole in Europe with "consistent working conditions" who works until he dies.
I hate people like this so much. It's like all of the liberal US-born SWEs who complain about living in the US. Like you stupid motherlover, half your team is made of people who moved half way around the world to give their family a better life and all you want to talk about is how Trump is literally hitler and health care should be socialized.
TBF I pointed this out to one of my coworkers who did this a lot and he conceded the point.
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you have no frickikng clue how unions work in many countries.
here there is very little workers rights by law. comanies can hire and fire as they basically want.
we also have strong unions.
and some of the highest wages in the eu
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Where the frick is here?
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who cares its a country in the eu
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all the countries in the EU may be poor, but that doesn't mean they're all equally poor
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How do they work differently?
I know how unions have affected pay in other high paying professions (in North America) and I want nothing to do with them.
e.g. airline pilots. Yeah, you'll make decent money… after 15 years. But if you get laid off and have to find a new job, you go back to making peanuts and your career is basically fricked.
The teaching assistant union was great back when I was a grad student though. We made double what the university down the street paid and did basically no work. That was different though because merit didn't matter.
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so here the companies are not unionized, it's not like an amazon warehouse votes to unionize, nor is it like a crew. There are maybe 5 big unions and they are often composed of smaller ones etc. What then happens is that the union for e.g. waiters / similar makes a negotiation with the "unions" of the employers. And they decide on e.g. aminimum wage /holiday / overtime pay etc. all that stuff.
Then, when somebody hires a waiter, and that waiter belongs to whatever union, if the restaurant is at least big enough, the unions expect that the hired person has the same rights as were negotiated.
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Interesting. So are wages consistent across companies? Or just kind of a basic set of expectations wrt minimum comp and benefits?
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He should just grind and save for a few years and retire to Thailand and plow ladyboys for the rest of his life.
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It's a greybeard thing. Once you've climbed the ladder as an IC as much as you can and are earning a ton of money based on a fragile seniority you stop caring about making sure others have opportunity and instead try to defend what you have - at this point unions become very attractive.
I'm in the same boat - not earning 750k/year but I'll get there some day (even w/o inflation), but probably not beyond this. And if I ever leave I'll probably end up losing a decent chunk of this at wherever I work next (assuming I don't just retire to bang Thai ladyboys for the rest of my life.) But I'm still not selfish enough to find unions enticing.
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Just curious, what's your current TC? I'm at ~500 and I would absolutely not make this trade. If I got fired, I could easily have another job within a month or two, though as you said, I also might take a bit of a pay cut. And more importantly, I don't want to get stuck working with someone who drags the team down and makes my life harder.
I actually have not seen that. I think at 750k you're probably at senior staff (maybe staff if you get lucky with vesting), which is not a position you typically just coast into. The guys I've worked with at that level are super smart and could easily find something else. I have also found that they care a lot about helping people like us grow and advance our careers. As the senior staff engineer I used to work with put it, he can have a lot more impact helping the team grow and execute than he could as a traditional IC.
The typical pro-union SWE in my experience has been lazy seniors who just want to coast while bikeshedding about pointless nonsense, or turbo soys who think the union should mostly exist to push bullshit about palestinoids or whatever.
My view of SWE "unions" might be slightly tainted by the AWU though. They collect 1% of your TC to... I actually don't even know. Post memes and complain about flavor of the month social issues. I don't really miss Google tbh.
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500 and I would absolutely not make this trade.I'm at 500 too. Non-FAANG.
Sure, I'm probably overgeneralizing a bit. Not all ICs will fall into this position. But I have two sets of circumstances in mind:
1. Peter principle. It's common for ICs to succeed at their current level, then be at the bottom 20% of the next level and unable to climb out of it because they are just not as talented as the other people at that level. There always has to be a bottom 20%, and people will realize that this is putting them in a precarious position. One where being unionized can help.
2. ICs that have climbed the ladder due to fragile tribal knowledge and organizational capital that have allowed them to assume tech leadership roles without deep generalist skills. These people will possibly significant pay cuts if they transfer to other firms, and may struggle even if reassigned within the company.
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Yeah I guess the bottom percent don't survive at L7 (which is why they'd want the union). In my experience, a big miss at that level has cross team impact and usually results in a dramatic firing.
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Darn, you're really mad over this, but thanks for the effort you put into typing that all out! Sadly I won't read it at all.
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Snapshots:
https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1gbcpk4/we_should_unionize_as_swesindustry_cause_we_are/:
undelete.pullpush.io
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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