The post by Cringely provides no references, which I find odd. I found a Bloomberg wire article [1] about the judgement, but nothing at all about the alleged subsequent retribution.
I did an intern year with IBM UK in the late eighties and (with hindsight) it seemed to have very good employment practices. I wonder if IBM in the US was once like that, and if so when things changed.
How often do you find out about such insider level information? Even stories like EA Spouse, how much detail do we really know that would be considered deeper than surface-level stuff?
To me it sounds just like he framed what happened in the IT industry in most corporations from 2001 onwards in a 'IBM is evil' manner. Dotcom happened, bombed, local skills got paid less while jobs got shipped offshore or automated away. The post about H1-B visas that he mentions, appears to be what most large corporations do with L1 visas, and that's probably what IBM was doing too.
I agree that some more references are in order. As it is now, all this post does is spread rumors. At least the lawsuit happened but it's hard to tell about the rest from the information we're given.
The solution is to unionize. I really don't understand why we don't have an IT union, especially for network ops and engineering - it's a very logical aspect of the industry to standardize and unionize.
- We all believe we're above average in our field, and unions would hold us back.
- We all know people who have skated by on incompetence, and wouldn't want a union to protect their jobs.
- Our field moves quickly, and we don't want a union that would hamper our ability to make quick moves.
- Union is a dirty word, especially when the mind disease of libertarianism is more prevalent among tech workers.
I think the easier way to solve this is for IT/computer workers to stop being paid salaries, and get paid hourly. If it weren't for a special exemption from congress that was passed in the 90s, we would be paid hourly as a matter of law. I know I've been treated MUCH better since I switched to consulting.
Employers value your time when they have to pay for those extra 2 hours of meetings each day, when they have you work a Saturday, or stay a couple hours late to push to the finish line. In addition, things like software efficiency upgrades where I can show 10 hour savings for 3 hours of cost are suddenly on the table, where on a salary you're not a "team player" if don't just put in the extra hours for free to save the company some bucks.
>I know I've been treated MUCH better since I switched to consulting.
This has been my experience as well. My time was considered more valuable, people respected my input and expertise more, I was treated with more courtesy. The works.
Isn't that funny? You could be the same person with the same experience as you had in a company somewhere, and in one place it's undervalued and in a new place it's fairly valued (hopefully).
I've seen it in the same company. At a previous employer I trippled the hourly rate and was amazed at how the same customers treated me completely differently.
These customers seemed to be valuing my time by how much they paid for it.
I don't want to weigh in on the union issue, but those last two paragraphs are spot on. I worked for IBM as a contractor a number of times and you are describing exactly the differences between those of us who were hourly and the salaried regular employees.
On the other hand, I wouldn't recommend working for IBM at all; there are reasons my resume reads like a list of major software project disasters of the '90's and it has a suspicious dearth of shipping products.
I think it's mostly the first one. I've met a lot of people with huge egos who think they are above the problems, and so far there is enough work. Someday, though, that might change, who knows when, though.
My grandfather was an aeronautical engineer who spent most of his career at one company - he joined early enough that he was friendly with the founder. That didn't stop them from laying him off right before he would have been able to collect his pension. (They did this with their other older engineers as well). This was around the end of the cold war when that whole sector was shrinking.
Say what you will about unions, but they do exist for a reason.
Completely disagree! I work in a unionized IT environment and I would accept a reasonable offer to go back to IBM.
Unions further complicate the relationship between employer and employee. It created "us vs. them" in every single implementation of unions. In the traditional 'Employee Relations' model, you could at least find a handful of good employers that value people. Not so the case in unionized environments. Employers' hands are forced to treat every employee as equal; the amazing, the good and the horrible all get the same treatment.
You don't like working conditions in the company - leave. You don't like conditions in your industry - switch specialty, go elsewhere. Too lazy to switch or too gifted to leave? Well, sure, OK, let's instead arm-twist and blackmail employer.
Given, there are circumstances when you can't leave or switch. Say, if you are a miner in a small mining town. One employer, one skill set, no possibility of re-training. But unions are essentially an artifact of the 19th century.
The very concept of work/life balance is an artifact of unionization. You hate everything about unions? Fascinating. How many have you worked for?
Edit: upon reflection my original comment left a lot on the floor so I'm circling back to pick some of it up.
Here's what a "typical" union experience looks like:
The union hall staffs individuals that find work for you. The bulk of back-office paperwork and other hassles (including wage negotiation) are handled on your behalf by the hall. When you first hire on it's typically as a pre-apprentice (no prior experience) or apprentice (some applicable experience to the trade). OJT and training/certification materials are provided for you.
Your coworkers are trained, experienced craftsmen. All applicable safety guidelines are rigidly enforced. From day 1 you are presented with the kind of benefits package that is no longer available to your average worker. In addition to credible health insurance this includes pension, annuity, on the job training and certification, and death benefits. In addition to your wage you are guaranteed additional compensation for overtime and hazardous work.
By way of comparison, working in the trades for a non-union shop is at best a crapshoot. There's no guarantee SS and other taxes are being taken out correctly or at all. I've known several subcontractors who've gotten royally screwed by the IRS come tax time when they found out that they (unexpectedly) owed thousands in taxes. Safety guidelines are routinely ignored, it's nothing to get shorted on your paycheck (or go weeks without pay), benefits are typically non-existent, no guarantees of overtime, and you're working sink or swim with whoever the boss could scrape together to form a crew, typically for less money than you'd make in a union shop and that's after dues. General contractors also tend to maintain a good-ol-boy network, so you go rocking the boat about substandard pay or unsafe working conditions and it's a very real possibility that you could find yourself blackballed in your area.
TL;DR: Union: guaranteed pay, safe working conditions, training provided for career advancement, benefits, retirement plan. Non-union: good luck, buddy.
Full disclosure: I worked in the trades (both union and non-union) for several years before changing career tracks to become a programmer. I do not regret my time with the Union and would go back in a heartbeat if for some reason coding was no longer a viable career option.
Based on anecdotal experiences mine were nearly the opposite. Now I was never a trades worker but I did work for a unionized company. Up to a few months ago before leaving for private sector.
Union:
- Everyone is complacent with work, majority of time is spent faking work or finding ways out of work (pay raises are not tied to performance)
- Net pay below average for industry (Below 50th percentile)
- Under-skilled workers protected by the union from being let go.
- Successes & Failures of the company are shared amongst the entire employee base. As a result there is no motivating drive to work harder to push better products out faster because there is no direct feedback resulting from it
- Training is provided on a seniority basis
Non-Union:
- Identical benefits (or at the very least negotiable) but higher base wage
- Skilled workers who are hired based off of recommendation of trusted employees exclusively
- Strong motivating factor to produce more deliverable work as it is a direct correlation to the business's success and therefore yours (profit sharing)
- Pay raise is tied to performance
- Training provided on an as needed basis -> The new guy might get training before the 10 year vet because he/she is the one going to be working with that particular skill set in the short time frame
----
Shared amongst those is equal work/life balance and safety. Labour laws have protected the workforce from shady practices you experienced (arguably an isolated incident). I'm thankful for what unions of the last few centuries have brought for us, but speaking in the majority of cases I've heard of, (anecdotal: take it as you will) they are now power hungry bodies that are corroding industry from the inside out.
I can't speak to your experiences other than to say it's disgusting mismanagement if true. I've heard similar stories involving non-trades union companies. I've also heard amazing success stories involving companies bought out of bankruptcy by their employees and turned into financial success stories. Guess it depends on the people involved.
One thing I can address is this:
" Labour laws have protected the workforce from shady practices you experienced (arguably an isolated incident)"
In manufacturing and trades (especially trades) this isn't even slightly accurate. Laws don't protect people, they provide a theoretical framework for compensation or punitive action after the fact. In practice a private citizen has almost no chance against a corporate lawyer in court, so it's almost impossible to prove workplace safety violations. On the rare ocassion that something does stick in court companies caught violating worker safety laws typically get a slap on the wrist, meanwhile whistleblowers better have a spare career up their sleeves or line up a settlement big enough to retire on because they
won't be working for any outfits in their industry once they pull the trigger on a court case. Good luck proving the last company you interviewed you didn't hire you because you blew the whistle on your last employer. :/
You're probably right on trades but what you said about management is entirely right. You can have good workplaces and bad ones regardless of union status.
Your definition of union is completely different from this conversation's definition of union. I wasn't even aware of your definition of union until I interviewed at this company that made software for unions as you describe them. Those unions are indeed exactly as you describe, and that company's customers used the company's software for tracking work of their union members, which were at what level of competency, even dispatching jobs, and so on. They were indeed tradesmen and craftsmen.
The unions discussed in this conversation are collective bargaining units that negotiate employment agreements with a single employer, and such negotiations are often huge, nasty, and difficult. I went through such a dispute with a telecom, and everyone not unionized had to work as a scab (doing the job of those who were unionized and not working). The union people would picket outside our building and insult us when we went for lunch, and we pulled 80 hour days to do their work (with fortunately amazing OT pay, and I was part of a team in charge of trying to automate everything in sight). But it was a nasty dispute.
The current NHL lockout that's happening is another similar union dispute, though you obviously don't see NHL players picketing NHL headquarters. :)
The problem is that the employee-employer relationship is imbalanced: you only have one employer (in the vast majority of cases) but you have many employees. If for example you are in an area with only one company in your field, you're very vulnerable: quitting would mean having to move yourself, your spouse, your children, sell your house etc... Some will use that to exploit you.
Unions are a way to redress the imbalance. Think of union membership as a mutual defence agreement.
You shouldn't evaluate the worthiness of unions based on the average HN situation of a young professional with relatively little debts/commitments working in a specialised and in-demand field.
What I do find outrageous is the way certain unions start getting heavily involved in politics. They should stick to protecting employees from abusive action by specific companies.
If there's only one company in your field, you likely have chosen the wrong field. You are trying to fight a non-competitive labor market with anti-wage-competition tactics. If there is only one company in your field, it is likely they are a niche, which can only expand payroll (as a percentage of earnings) to a certain degree before they damage investment return and collapse the capitalization of their enterprise.
Your comment is at odds with itself. On the one hand, you say that if you don't like the working conditions, leave, on the other hand you point to one of the most unskilled and exploited labor positions (mining) as a good use for a union.
Which union do you think has more power: The AMA or a union for miners? In one, the employees are scarce, limited, and irreplaceable. In the other, the employees are numerous, easy to train, and very replaceable. Why would you try to justify a union for one and not the other when it's clear that there's no value in dealing with a mining union - it's cheaper to just bring in new employees.
Exactly, that was the point. Miners need unions more because it's easier for them to be exploited. They probably need legal protections because they aren't coming from positions with many valid choices.
On the other hand, tech workers aren't in a commonly harmful, let-alone fatal, profession and we enjoy pretty good mobility. We don't need unions half as much as we need to take a principled stand and vote with our feet.
Please turn in your 40 hour work week, 2 day weekend, paid vacation, overtime, paid holidays, medical benefits, prohibitions against child labor, minimum wage, and unemployment insurance.
Unionization really only makes sense in industries where work is very much to spec, and many people perform the same function, to the same standard of quality, and there is no reason or benefit to exceed that quality. Otherwise, a unionized work force becomes a market for lemons, with everyone driving average quality down.
The unions for doctors and lawyers aren't really the same thing as "normal" unions. They're more advocacy based.
The unions for teachers exist because teachers are (wrongly IMHO) considered by their employer to be in the parents poster's category. If teachers weren't considered a commodity I think they would have less need for unions.
And professional athletes unions are usually restrained to sports where the employers are a cartel (or even a single entity). The cartel phenomenon is similar in the case of actors.
And professional athletes unions are usually restrained to sports where the employers are a cartel (or even a single entity). The cartel phenomenon is similar in the case of actors.
Interesting point about the employer cartel, since the SV Tech Giants (Google, Apple, etc.) were outed as colluding to keep salaries down and not poach employees from one another earlier this year. Maybe that is a starting point for grounds to consider unionizing? Maybe?
No, I wouldn't see any reason to. Having a union that endorses members will create a professional body that is superior to non-unioned workers, making being part of the union a clear advantage.
I'm not following how being a member of a union would make me any better than a non-union worker; thus I am not seeing the clear advantage of membership being a positive endorsement to me.
"Having a union that endorses members" doesn't lead directly to the creation of "a professional body that is superior to non-unioned workers". IT/IS workers are usually considered "superior" (and thus more marketable) based on the degree of their knowledge and the effectiveness of their problem solving skills, to which membership in a collective bargaining society adds neither.
Perhaps rather than forcing people to join, you want to force employers to exclude non-members? So that rather than being "under management's thumb" I can be under the "union's protection"?
I think your parent's point was that if the union can guarantee that its members are high-quality, it will have a lot of leverage to negotiate with employers. A union taking that approach doesn't need to stipulate that employers only employ union workers or anything like that; it simply says "all of the best people work for us - if you want to hire them, you have to agree to our terms (re. salary, benefits, working conditions, etc).
"Having a union that endorses members will create a professional body that is superior to non-unioned workers" looks (to me) like an assertion that the value is in the union endorsement (and that it thus create the professional body), as opposed to the workers themselves.
As I've asserted, information workers are valued for their knowledge and problem solving skills, so unless this hypothetical union were going to certify people as having certain knowledge and problem solving skills and include/exclude members based on that certification (or give them a grading level), it will be meaningless as a value indicator to any employer. If I think the level they give me is too low, I won't be likely to stay associated with them. If employers think they rate people too high, they'll avoid them also.
If the "professional" union is just a middleman, I'd prefer not to have it, and I'm fairly certain sure employers wouldn't either.
Of course, professional bodies (outside of trade organizations) exist like this, but they are called consulting companies.
The final statement in the article engages in a fallacy that all members in a job market have the same level of mobility without consideration of individual factors, such as:
* Potential age-bias for older workers ([1] is an example of the discussion related to this, without being exhaustive obviously)
* Local job market (relevant and equivalent positions)
* Physical mobility (family situation, value of house in market relative to mortgage for re-___location)
* Spousal situation (Spouse may not be able to relocate)
It's always so easy to dismiss the workers in these cases and say "they should just leave," but this meme gets out-of-hand. The reality is it's often no easier to leave than to stay, and in some situations quite difficult to do so. This should never be used to excuse abusive practices by employers with the line "well, the market will take care of it."
They have a non-Flash tag cloud as well that it falls back to. But the larger question is why they need any tag cloud at all in 2012, they were fun for about 3 seconds and then they became just another tool for SEO.
If you're with them in the US right now and you want to keep your job, yeah, probably best not to mess. This is because it is pretty much stated policy to scale the company back in that area, in favour of building the company in 'growth' markets where people are cheaper and closer to the action.
There's not enough growth in the US to support the revenue requirements of the behemoth, and as US employees are both expensive and easy to get rid of, they tend to be the first to suffer.
(compared to, say, EU employees who are also expensive but harder to ditch).
The very generous and un-bureaucratic short-term unemployment benefits really help as well, I think. For up to two years, you can get up to $3k/month unemployment without even having to deal with a government office, through an a-kasse, which are subsidized membership organizations you can join. They'll help you find work as well, and line up classes or unpaid internships if you need to gain skills/experience.
It ends up smoothing over some of the friction that discourages people from changing jobs, because if you quit your job and take a few months to find another one, you still get a livable salary in between, so there isn't this huge fright of being between jobs that keeps many Americans from jumping even when it would ultimately be advantageous to do so (the fact that you don't lose health care coverage when you quit your job helps too).
Two years of unemployment benefits are considered “short-term”? Wow.
In the US, benefits usually run out at 26 weeks. Congress took note of the Great Recession and extended that to 39 weeks, or 48 weeks in states with over-6-percent unemployment, but that extension expires at the end of this year.
And Americans only get unemployment benefits if they are laid off; if you quit or are fired for cause, you’re screwed.
True, though I didn't mean objectively short, just that there's a distinction between the part of the welfare system that addresses long-term social problems (homeless, chronically unemployed, etc.), which is the regular state welfare system, and the decentralized, privately administered system with a time limit that's intended to smooth over finite periods of unemployment.
There's a hard to quantify cultural element to the difference, which I think is part of what makes it work reasonably well, at least in many cases. The a-kasse project a fairly positive image, of job-finding assistance for people temporarily out of work. People are both assumed to be finding a job in good faith (at least initially), and are encouraged to view the chance of getting one as likely (perhaps with assistance or upskilling). So it doesn't have the same aura of charity/leecher/etc. or dead-endness that Americans tend to associate with welfare (and which even many Danes associate with the "regular" welfare system, e.g. people receiving Kontanthjælp).
There's even some hope that it'll produce a sort of win-win, viewing unemployed people who aren't long-term unemployed as untapped resources that can be used to solve various labor shortages in Denmark. Part of the a-kasse's job is monitoring their sector for what kinds of skills are needed, developing relationships with companies, and figuring out how to plug their unemployed members (perhaps after training) into unfilled needs of those companies.
Did you pay into unemployment insurance? I doubt it very much -- self-employed persons typically don't have to pay into it, unless they in turn have employees.
If I work as a consultant for 10 years and on average make $100k a year, I have to pay taxes on said $100k, like everyone else. Actually as a self-employed person I pay more than those with jobs, yet if the economy or my business collapses and I get no clients for 6 months, why would I not be entitled to collect on what I've paid into the system?
Someone who came right out of college, made $50k for two years, is entitled to double digit weeks of unemployment benefits.
Edit: Egg on face. Just looked up the details, while I pay taxes, it seems none of these go towards unemployment insurance, unlike when you're employed, which is why the self-employed don't qualify. Lots of differences from state-to-state too, but in NY it's impossible to "participate" unless you set it up as an s-corp.
Yeah it is considered short-term and people are howling about how they are going to lose their benefits at January first, it used to be four years rather than two.
Europe is doing it's best to weaken social security as well, they can't afford to take care of people who have no job.
"flexicurity" is an eupheumism invented by the EU for the central neoliberal tenet "you are now a product". It's not only making it easier to fire someone, it also reduces employees to the subjective opinion of the manager; whether or not you do your job properly is no longer the main issue, your personality is.
The idea is that since you can get fired at whim, you'll be able to get a job faster and you'll be more productive, which is great because the economy is the only thing that matters in today's politics.
Sounds vaguely like walmart's anti-union emergency lawyer team:
Wal-Mart has responded to the union drive by trying to stop workers from organizing -- sometimes in violation of federal labor law. In 10 separate cases, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Wal-Mart repeatedly broke the law by interrogating workers, confiscating union literature, and firing union supporters. At the first sign of organizing in a store, Wal-Mart dispatches a team of union busters from its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas...
...The retaliation can be extreme. In February 2000, the meat-cutting department at a Wal-Mart in Jacksonville, Texas, voted to join the UFCW -- the only Wal-Mart in the nation where workers successfully organized a union. Two weeks after the vote, the company announced it was eliminating its meat-cutting departments in all of its stores nationwide. It also fired four workers who voted for the union. "They held a meeting and said there was nothing we could do," recalls Dotty Jones, a former meat cutter in Jacksonville. "No matter which way the election went, they would hold it up in court until we were old and gray."
"The FLSA requires that covered employees in the United States be paid at least the federal minimum wage for each hour they work and overtime pay at one and one-half the employee's regular rate of pay for all hours worked over 40 in a workweek."
For the FLSA section 13(a)(1) exemptions to apply, an employee generally must be paid on a salary basis of no less than $455 per week and perform certain types of work that:
[...]
is in the computer field, or
[...]
> A number of states have also enacted minimum wage and overtime pay laws, some of which provide greater worker protections than those provided by FLSA. In those situations where an employee is covered by both Federal and state wage laws, the employee is entitled to the greater benefit or more generous rights provided under the different parts of each law.
This doesn't really surprise me. At some point IBM did the numbers and figured out they were more profitable concentrating on services, and they ditched their printer division, ditched their storage division, ditched their laptop division, etc..
Companies are supposed to be money making machines that always follow logical decisions to make more, it's supposed to make selling business services/software to them easier because you just have to prove you'll save them money, but I don't think a lot of them would have changed over like that. They play hard ball, even with themselves.
That said, I've worked for IBM, and was treated very well. I worked overtime all the time, though, and it wasn't odd to see managers around even very late at night doing the same thing. I don't think I've ever had a full time programming job where everyone didn't work overtime for salary without overtime pay, actually. I think there were some contractors around when I was there, but they counted their hours, only did little jobs that amounted to exactly what they were told, and were not very effective or useful. You didn't want one on your projects, that was for sure.
So it doesn't surprise me if IT professionals who start demanding that start getting listed as more expensive for the business and cut out. It is the logical money making decision by the business after all.
Just because its a logical decision on IBMs part dosent make it ethical . You 've completely neglected to mention your view on whether this is right or wrong.
If the company is in position to treat you as a slave (e.g. it can decrease your compensation or degrade your status without suffering and the only thing preventing it from this is their goodwill), there is a good chance they would.
If the jobs market is so badly screwed that they can treat server admins as slaves, maybe USA is no longer sustainable after all?
Because you know, in a normal job market, those server admins quit. And IBM has to hire new server admins. For considerably higher salaries (because of bubble inflation and because of haste to fill positions).
No, it's quite possible to hire new server admins at the same salaries or less, and just endure lower quality work. I see it all the time. It all depends on where the company's priorities are, normal job market be damned.
I think you didn't get his point. You're actually agreeing with him. You're saying that it's quite possible to ignore the notion of a normal job market in the USA. So, it's not sustainable, competitive equilibrium don't exists.
I think instead he's saying that in a "normal" job market it's possible to higher server admins of lesser experience for lower pay and suffer through the consequences of having to train them up and get them proficient. There's good business reasons not to do this but that doesn't make it any less of a normal job market
1. How low a quality of service are customers willing to bear, trading off price and quality?
2. What is the supply of such lower-rate employees who can continue feeding the beast, once the trained employees become too expensive for the company to keep? If they could afford to keep well-trained employees, they probably would be able to attract good employees from the get go.
3. How good is the company's employee retention rate for keeping well-trained employees without significantly raising salaries?
Is that really what happens? You can't hire someone with the same experience as the previous one had starting out, so prices are effectively rising. Is this related to the value of currency decreasing?
Not only bubble inflation, on a normal job market, people would quit, and the turnover costs would be bad for IBM.
But, actually, i do believe IBM was not smart on this one, that 15% cut will result on a productivity shortage way below 15%. That level of demotivation don't pay off.
I fail to understand your sarcasm. It is, well, a normal situation when employers compete for employees the same way employees compete for jobs. I fail to see how IBM managed to be in tech but extempt from it.
The idea that people can always just quit and be hired elsewhere is not one that exists anywhere in real life, not just the US. Sometimes quitting is not an option.
Many countries recognise this, however, and regulate companies' behaviour towards its employees. IBM's exploitation of its sysadmins would be totally illegal in (most of?) the EU.
> Next IBM restricted the workers to 40 hour weeks so there would be no overtime.
> VP approval was required each time someone was needed to work overtime. The net result was all the server admins worked exactly 40 hours a week and for 15 percent less pay.
I'm assuming they weren't physically allowed to work for more than 40 hours a week and I wonder why it's perceived as a bad thing.
I honestly won't be surprised if the workers were expected to work overtime, but just weren't allowed to log more than 40 hours a week in their timesheets.
I'm not one to normally subscribe to the 'if you don't like the working conditions don't work there' line of reasoning, especially in the US where unions are so weak. But in tech, eh, we have options.
a) The lawsuit was settled in 2006 (ref andyjohnson0's post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4687336). The article doesn't say when it was instigated, but it was likely a couple of years prior to that. In 2006, the tech industry was still working its way out of the collapse of the tech bubble.[1][2] Workers and companies were still pretty shell-shocked.
b) A lot of people live in places where the technology sector is not that strong and thus there are not that many options. Often moving is not a viable option due to family responsibilities or other circumstances.
Uh, thanks for the wiki link to the dot-com bubble, I guess.
a) I don't really care about. I doubt much has changed and I don't think it was from fiscal necessity. Also, if they were shell-shocked in 2006 I can't imagine things have improved since then. It's actually disappointing as I rather admire IBM's leadership in open source. Alas, much easier to damage a reputation than build and keep a good one.
As for b), okay point taken. So, don't work at IBM, if you can help it.
"b), okay point taken. So, don't work at IBM, if you can help it."
You can't really help it because there is no guarantee that IBM won't just come along and buy the company you work for. I know lots of people that quit my company when IBM bought it. For this one older lady (HR Director) she has had to keep getting new jobs because 2 of the last companies she worked for got bought by IBM. She doesn't want to work for them so she just had to find another job and then quit.
I'm not in this situation myself, but I know that people who are not citizens / don't have permanent resident status have far fewer options if they want to work in the States.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/technology/23IBM.html