When Techies Consider Unions

MSNBC ^ | 10/27/03 | Earnshaw, Aliza

[Ronzo]

When techies consider unions

By Aliza Earnshaw, The Business Journal of Portland

The very notion of a labor union for software developers and other information-technology workers may strike some as paradoxical, or even ridiculous. After all, techies are thought of as well-compensated, highly skilled workers. So the beginnings of a techie labor union here in the Portland area, called ORTech, may come as a surprise to many who work with or are themselves high-tech workers.

"THEY [TECHIES] THINK of themselves as highly skilled individuals who are valued for what they are," said Ilya Ratner, a programmer with years of experience working in Portland companies, and a co-founder of ORTech. "They don't understand their place in the food chain," failing to comprehend that despite their skills, executives are looking for every possible way to get "two heads for the price of one," whether through overseas outsourcing, applying for foreign-worker visas, or keeping labor costs low by using contractors, Ratner said.

[Ronzo]

This isn't a good sign, is it?

_{Quick, somebody call the AFL-CIO!}

[PFKEY]

I've been in the IT industry for 10+ years and had always considered those who code to be highly skilled. I've dabbled enough to know that my mind just doesn't work in the abstract very well and certainly not very quickly. When I did manage to string some code together that actually produced the desired result it was as though I had given life to something.

What amazes me is that there are so many programmers out of work or having their work offshored.

Has programming become so easy?

[jocon307]

From my own business experience with techies of all sorts, nothing could be worse.

Nothing against techies, but seriously, these folks unionized will make postal employees & public school teachers look like Chris Columbus and Jonas Salk, combined.

My only question: will they be forced to take their coffee breaks while the download does that?

[BfloGuy]

Nothing like a union to speed up the outsourcing trend.

[Pukin Dog]

What a great idea. Just kill off the industry for good in America. Go ahead, unionize. Enjoy your unemployment.

[Michael Barnes]

Recall Westinghouse? A couple of their data centers were unionized. Let me tell you, at 2AM, you WOULD NOT GET SHIT DONE.

Recall Westinghouse? Yup, it was sold down the river. It's IT outsourced, and to my knowledge these days, well, shazzam, what's left is pretty sparse....

BTW, I loved that company....Man it was just too cool working there.

[Moose4]

Well, as a programmer, some days, a union sounds good. When I'm working 50+ hours a week and still getting paid for 40, without comp time, or when I'm doing what I'm doing now--posting to FR on one computer at 12:30 am while my other one is watching stuff run at work, since I'm on 24-hour call this week (no extra pay or comp time)...let's just say those are the times when the Dark Side gets mighty tempting.

Up until now technical people had the ultimate capitalistic weapon against crappy management like I work for, we could just go somewhere else. Even me, a COBOL programmer on supposedly "obsolete" mainframes, could write my own ticket during the whole Y2K hype. Nowadays the worm has turned, and the job market is tighter. But that doesn't mean that I can't switch jobs to get away from a cruddy situation like I'm in now, I just have to work harder at it. And pray real hard.

(beg) BTW, if anybody needs a 15-year veteran COBOL programmer in Georgia or the Carolinas, let me know! (/beg)

}:-)4

[rmlew]

Has programming become so easy?
Ineffecient buggy and non-migratable/revisable code is easy. Just higher a bunch of partially skilled people with a code generator. The consumer has been conditioned to accept buggy bloatware that requires 10 revisions. Under this model getting 9 poor programers from India makes sense, so long as they have 1 competent manager. If the foreign employee costs 1/5th as much and produces 1/3 the output, the company is ahead, at least in the short run. Thanks to the speculative nature of the Stock Market the next 4 quarters is all what counts.

[sourcery]

The problem is that the USD is overvalued. The reason it's overvalued is because a) it's the world's reserve currency, so market forces don't have as much effect on its exchange rate as they would otherwise, and b) it's a fiat currency whose supply is under the control of a central bank, who relies on the status of the USD as the world's reserve currency to get away with money supply expansion that would otherwise not be tolerated by the market.

[PFKEY]

I don't delve into code at all but I do see its results on a multi-corporate, multi-national basis every day. Seems that for the most part it works or is easily fixed. Usually in less then 2 hours. Granted we are talking production code not beta (if that is the correct word).

Is there a big difference in quality and skill between development and support/maintenance? I see these two functions being intertwined.

[rmlew]

I'm not a professional coder.

[etcetera]

Techs today are already in unions, mostly by working in union shops like in government. The unions don't mind what with their dwindling memberships. The unions find some bargaining unit for those who aren't in the usual unionized trades.

Should techs be is unions? I say yes. And that's after years of working in banks, hospitals, saving and loans, and supermarkets.

I, too, have spent years working shifts, being on call, with and without overtime or comp time.

And I've learned to seek jobs where they don't do inventory, print bills or invoices or statements. Or depend on computer equipment to keep people alive.

[SwankyC]

No its more difficult. Difficult to keep up with the language du-jour.

[SAJ]

Programming has ALWAYS been easy, given a well-described result to be achieved AND a well-defined system environment in which to achieve it. The simple case is getting dressed in the morning; no one ever puts on his or her socks AFTER putting on his or her shoes. Within any named system environment, programming is merely a matter of describing and executing a specific process or set of processes in a not-logically-inconsistent sequence.

Examine your assumptions more closely, if you would, please. Practically no business or other organisation even WANTS a really top-quality software system, no matter how they may pretend to want such. Cost aside, if the system is REALLY top-end, only the designer and possibly a very highly skilled analyst or two will actually understand the system, in all its facets, and be able to maintain it. This situation, though, is anathema to the organisation weenies -- because they cannot understand the underlying processes or the dynamic structure of their own information system(s), they consider that they are at risk of (whatever), and so resent the existence of such a system, and resist the development of such system(s) in the first place.

In plain language, and I've seen this result directly many times in the past 30 years, the org weenies would MUCH rather have inferior and even demonstrably error-prone IT system(s) than accept competently designed and logically complete system(s). They are incapable of simply using the tools designed by their superiors; they must, to satisfy their own fragile egos, have ''control'' -- no matter how illusory and no matter how fanciful the ''control'', and with utter disregard for the quality and value added of any software system -- over their environment.

Or, at least, they must SUPPOSE that they do.

FReegards!

[yevgenie]

<rant>
From personal experience writing code for the last 20+ years, I have discovered that the primary reasons for buggy code are:

• LAZY programmers
• STUPID programmers
• Copy-and-Paste; Drag-and-drop

In recent years, the market has been flooded with people who really have no business working in the computer world. Many of them got their degrees having cheated their way through college. These are people who CANNOT code.
Most security holes in software today come from recognized sources: buffer overruns, stack-smashing, etc.
They persist because the "programmers" often just "lift" code written by sloppy people and add it to a new program.
</rant>
It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty's grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding employments. During the course of these troubles, the emperors of Blefuscu did frequently expostulate by their ambassadors, accusing us of making a schism in religion, by offending against a fundamental doctrine of our great prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth chapter of the Blundecral (which is their Alcoran). This, however, is thought to be a mere strain upon the text; for the words are these: 'that all true believers break their eggs at the convenient end.'

[PFKEY]

You said a mouthful or two to be sure but let me pick this quote and examine it a bit more closely.

Examine your assumptions more closely, if you would, please. Practically no business or other organisation even WANTS a really top-quality software system, no matter how they may pretend to want such. Cost aside, if the system is REALLY top-end, only the designer and possibly a very highly skilled analyst or two will actually understand the system, in all its facets, and be able to maintain it.

First off unless the business itself is a software company then I don't see where they would care to or want to understand this quality software system.

Does it do what the user wants it to do without it taking a 5 day course just so some designer or highly skilled analyst can demonstrate their superior knowledge.

No slight to you or any programmer/designer. I always considered these folks to be far smarter than I.

[Moose4]

I think it's become easier with the newer languages and development environments, but it's never "easy." Thirty years ago programmers were writing their programs on old punch cards, thousands of them for a program (each card was a single, 80-character line of code). Miskey something? You throw away the card and punch another one. Want your program compiled? You walk down to the card reader and load your squillions of cards in, and pray you don't drop the box they're in! Fortunately, this was a few years before my time. :) Nowadays, you can drag and drop, cut, paste, hell, there's code generators that'll practically write whole systems for you.

Programming is a mindset, really. Some of the best programmers I've known have been people with college degrees in completely unrelated subjects (nursing and English) or no degree at all, self-taught. Some of the worst have held doctorates. Learning the programming languages isn't terribly difficult. It's knowing how to analyze, how to test, how to get an eye for detail, how to work a problem, that's what makes good programmers. I firmly believe some of that stuff can't be taught, you either have it or you don't.

To me, that's what's maddening about trying to change jobs like I am now. I know I'm not God's gift to the mainframe programming world, but I'm really solid in a few areas (COBOL, JCL), can write good code, can analyze, and can learn fast. There are people out there as contract programmers that can't analyze, code, and test their way out of a paper bag, and THOSE are the ones that always seem to be able to bullsh!t their way into jobs at $50/hour over and over again. I've worked with too many of them--and then they move on and I get to clean up their messes. Eventually the companies figure this out and terminate their contracts, but there's always another position waiting for them. Unions for IT worry me because those incompetent programmers would get even more protection than they have now.

Ah well...when I get too morose about things, dwelling on the fact that my employer pays us mainframe toads $15k less than other programmers, makes us do overtime and 24/7 call with no pay or comp time, and generally treats us like snake poop, I just thank God for all the good stuff in my life, start thinking about how to get out of this industry in a few years and what I'll do next, and remind myself that, at least for now, I still HAVE a job. It hasn't gone to Bangalore...yet.

}:-)4

[SAJ]

Couldn't agree with you more! But you forgot to include code generaters...heh heh heh.

Wouldn't you LOVE to read what Dr. Swift might have written about computers and computing??

[SAJ]

As our colleague noted, programming is a mindset. Smart? Dumb? Who cares? A competent systems designer might be any of the above. The only requisite is that he/she understand the process being programmed, thoroughly.

You want to differentiate between organisational requirements and user requirements. The user interface, certainly, should be clean and direct (which lets Windows out, to be sure), and should not (as you correctly note) require the taking a 5-day course for the user to be able to use the software and obtain worthwhile results.

The organisational interface is another matter entirely. The CEO (or whichever executive) rarely has direct interest in the software; he/she wants its results, first and foremost. This is clearly reasonable in the same sense that the architect does not usually lay bricks. Presumably, the concern of the organisation is directed to A) the initial cost of the system, B) the maintenance cost of the system, C) the quantity, quality, and reliability of the information generated by the system, D) the rapidity with which useful information can be generated and distributed by the system, and E) the facility of the system, which we may otherwise term its ease of use. There are some folks who will include E within D, for the two are related, but that discussion is not to our purpose here.

The problem lies principally in that there are large numbers of mid-level functionaries in any sizeable organisation, whether competent in their jobs or not, who subordinate these five concerns to their acquisition of promotion, perquisites, or simply ''turf''. If, as is the case frequently, a less-than-optimum result for, say, C above exists in the current system, and this result could be improved markedly at little or no cost in time and materiel, this type of functionary will not even CONSIDER the attainable result if it would have a side effect of diminishing his localised authority, or (Heaven forbid) result in a net lowering of his budget in the next cycle.

Shortsighted, you say? Yep. Selfish? No doubt. Not in the best interest of the organisation? Spot on.

And utterly ubiquitous, very sadly so. Which, in sum, is one principal reason why so many organisations' systems fellate deceased canines.

FReegards!

[SAJ]

geneeraters ==> generators

sorry about that