> Unions exist to benefit the median and bring up the floor, but it stifles competition among those who really do desire to be at the top. And in doing so while it brings up the floor, it also brings down the ceiling because people who would normally be motivated enough to move up would not have much incentive to do so anymore.
I think people tend to fixate on the worker-to-worker differences inside of unions. Yes, that is the most visible part of a union when in place, and at least in the US has valid arguments about meritocracy.
What is missed when limiting the scope to just that is the population-level abuses of workers that no amount of meritocracy will fix. When corporations engage in collusion against workers (now common and nearly unpunished in the US) the top-level wages are suppressed industry wide.
The whole pay band alignment that comes out of that undermines the meritocracy argument, and doesn't even begin to address the wage-fixing that has gone almost unchecked in tech for decades[1,2]. As a merited employee, you might have more options to where you can go, but it won't protect you from predatory hiring/layoff cycles and it certainly won't guarantee that you'll receive a truly competitive wage.
On paper, meritocracy sounds great. I have worked many places in tech and never once observed it, personally. Best case, if you have warmed a seat for enough years, then you advance that way. Worst, your employer knows they can just take advantage of you because you're willing to work without a dangling carrot.
As before, either the government frees itself from corruption and enacts justice or unions will come back. That is point we are at.
Meritocracy is still a slur word by the left, that never changed, the left doesn't like meritocracy and the right likes it. So a left winger writing about the horrors of meritocracy doesn't mean that meritocracy is bad.
I find the left/right approach altogether ridiculous for this, it's but a spurious oversimplification which usually shows lack of understanding for the topic discussed. In this particular case, it also shows that you didn't bother to read what meritocracy actually is, since you claim, against the very inventor of the word, that it's a good thing without producing any evidence or reasoning.
hey now, they should be grateful they get enough tokens for their appointments with ClaudeMD for their statistically below par data labeling performance, we could reduce the allowance if we keep hearing that kind of talk. We have been very generous with portions at the automatic canteen as well, that energy could be better allocated to the maintenance bots in the server farm.
Flock is only one company. Someone in my town smashed one from a different company and was treated like a hero in Facebook comments. It’s not mentioned in the article.
Not that I’d want to work there given what they do, but every time I’ve been contacted by a recruiter there, it seems like it’s within a month of a mass layoff they’ve had… which is maybe just because they seem to have mass layoffs every quarter now.
They also seem to have adopted a no-remote hire policy and are in an extreme high CoL location. It’s a truly awful mix for trying to attract outside talent. I don’t know why they even bother.
Any discussion related to this topic always seems to assume everyone uses code the same way and for the same function, and then forces the rest of the world through that lens.
So here we walk around the circle one more time again, voicing our anxieties, talking past each other, waiting for the next opportunity for commentary to come in half an hour.
reply