Not to create too much of a political tangent, but the lack of private offices, or rather the ubiquitous mandatory nature of open offices, and its universal unpopularity with non-managers, is evidence imo that tech could use a union or professional association or guild or something.
Oh sure you can talk about high comp and career mobility. But where does all of the vaunted labor power of software engineers go when they ask for something as simple as a cubicle?
In my opinion, you might have an overly optimistic view of unions. And you might also be ignoring the downsides of unions.
I get that unions were/are necessary for things like mining workers or so, but SWE is quite different. I'd expect a union to be net-negative in our sector.
Systemic problems require systemic solutions. For over a decade now we’ve seen a steady supply of blog articles, studies (e.g. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/in-open-offices-work...), and choruses of comment threads all agreeing that coders do not like open offices. Yet all of this is empty sentiment because managements don’t seem to care; they might not even notice. Now, a union might not be the solution to this. I already mentioned alternatives. Maybe there should just be more general participation in the ACM/IEEE and give it lobbying power. But the principle is that some sort of collective action seems to be in order, because there’s collective disgruntlement, yet the issue is still unaddressed.
So is complaining on blogs uselessly for over a decade while expecting things to change.
And the overall point isn’t simply that unions will fix open offices so much as some sort of solution rooted in collective action is required.
It’s also an illustration that as a professional class, software engineers and tech workers in general really don’t have as much power in their industry as their comp and perks would illustrate. Especially in times of economic pullback.
Oh sure you can talk about high comp and career mobility. But where does all of the vaunted labor power of software engineers go when they ask for something as simple as a cubicle?