Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48181370

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47925412

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

There might be a disconnect, but I think it's probably not in the direction you expect.

The vast majority of high-performing engineering teams (good startups, big tech companies) don't hire standard SWEs for specific language/framework expertise. The truth absolutely is that languages are interoperable enough that someone who is smart and understand the underlying principles can get up to speed in a new ecosystem quickly.

Swear words are specifically used to be provocative, so naturally they're not going to disappear. Words like "motherboard" or "whitelist" were historically neutral and primarily used in professional settings, so removal from corporate speech is correspondingly a much bigger factor.

To be clear, I'm not particularly worried or concerned about this. I don't consider it any great loss if we start saying "allowlist" and have happily changed my projects to match. It's not a big deal, and the kind thing to do is to go along with those who do care a lot.

Most software developers, even top performers, are not brand name celebrities. If the union forces everyone to follow a contract, they will need to comply. Realistically, tech unions will end up looking a lot more like journalist unions than football stars.

This is explicitly the goal of the new NYT union: they are looking to "begin negotiations for a contract with management."

Some union boss negotiating my employment contract is my worst nightmare. I have friends who work in union companies and they hate the union's policies but are terrified of going against the union bosses.

Meanwhile, the union provides no value to the business.

It is terrible to hold back progress just to provide "make-work" jobs protected by unions. Should we still employ elevator operators?

In a scenario where my job is obsolete, a union would simply delay the inevitable. It might keep the company from replacing me with an AI, but the company would therefore eventually fail to competitors who could. In the meantime, the union would make people miserable and delay progress.

For what it's worth, I completely agree that developer jobs are on their way towards automation. Instead of trying to fight that trend with unionization, I focus on being part of it (building automation tools) and building a capital base.

We use release-please to automatically generate WIP "release PRs" so we can see the exact changelog (for a candidate release) drafted as merges come in.

[0] https://github.com/googleapis/release-please

That's not necessarily a bad thing! A big problem with existing departments is decades of corruption, poor leadership, and entrenched policies. Tearing the department down and rebuilding it from scratch—even if you end up with a similar size as before—gives you the opportunity to remove the excesses/abuse. You can also do things like hiring more specialized positions and firing all the bad officers (because if the department is gone, the union can't protect them).

Personally, IKEA fits my lifestyle pretty well as a young urban-dweller. I don't really anticipate having my furniture for more than 5-10 years and their aesthetic definitely matches my preferences.

I've actually looked at some more "premium" stores and really disliked a lot of their merchandise unless it was obscenely expensive (ie. 10x the price of IKEA).

For some developers (including me), working on projects with significant business value is the definition of glamorous. Since there's significant business value, then you should be rewarding people for delivering that value (with bonuses and raises).

If the task does not have significant business value, it's probably not actually important. A lot of maintenance tasks actually fall in this bucket.

Yup. It honestly astounds me how many people don't factor this into their decision-making. Your only equity compensation on joining is the delta between your strike price and the current market value of your stock. This is often very little, far less than you give up in salary at many companies.

There's absolutely no way that's correct. It'd basically be pushing csallen to leave (he's an experienced YC founder, MIT grad, and full-stack developer). His market salary is way more than $120k/yr.