Comment by matrix87 4 days ago
No more unpaid overtime. The right to ignore work messages outside of business hours. No more noncompetes
It's a race to the bottom because of the visa worker situation. People will wake themselves up at 3AM on a saturday because shitty tooling made something in prod break.
Many of my friends are visa workers, but if you're working with people living in fear of deportation, it tends to fuck up the work life boundary across the board
> working overtime when you're remote is YOUR choice.
I'm not sure of what part of industry you're coming from. For me, it's backend web services + data pipelines for a large corporation
Often overtime work is expected. Deployments always happen late in the evening because of there's a diurnal traffic pattern. Oncall is unavoidable and the expectation they have is that regardless of when you get paged, you have to wake up and respond to it
I know personally companies that laid off a major percentage (50% in one case) of their software engineers to replace them with cheaper foreign and visa workers. I don't know if you've tried to find a job recently, but it's as bad as it's ever been regardless of level of experience.
Don't think US citizens are sitting in luxury. Your company will fire you and replace you with cheaper replacements in an instant.
I quit my job to start my own company. We are immediately profitable and already on trajectory to double my previous income (which was high $1xx,000).
You can replace code monkeys, but you can’t replace people who can use code to solve real business problems on time and under budget.
> No more noncompetes
FWIW those were recently completely outlawed: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/.... In theory you can happily sign a noncompete and promptly ignore it. Unlawful contracts are unenforceable.
That does not diminish the value of unions, though.
The FTC decision has already been halted by a Texas court nationwide. It's probably going to make it's way to the Supreme Court eventually, but given the courts recent rulings I suspect the FTC rule won't survive.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/09/05/ftc-noncompete-ru...
https://eig.org/state-noncompete-map/
> Nearly one in five workers in the United States are bound by a noncompete agreement preventing them from finding a new job or starting a business in their field when they leave their employer. Noncompetes are currently governed at the state level, and as a growing body of research shows that noncompetes suppress wages, reduce job mobility, and stifle innovation, states are moving rapidly to restrict them. Currently, four states ban the use of noncompetes entirely and 33 states plus DC restrict their use.
Saw an interesting interview on The Majority Report with David Dayen about the FTC ruling and non-competes in general:
The FTC rule banning noncompetes was blocked by the courts: https://www.npr.org/2024/08/21/g-s1-18376/federal-judge-toss...
As explained by the FTC, "A district court issued an order stopping the FTC from enforcing the rule on September 4. The FTC is considering an appeal. The decision does not prevent the FTC from addressing noncompetes through case-by-case enforcement actions." (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/features/noncompetes)
That Chevron Deference decision might change the authority that the FTC has in interpreting that.
i'm a visa worker and i've seen people in my country say that visa workers are prejudicial to the country's work environment.
what if this kind of person gets to union leadership and just accepts a bad deal to visa workers?
what about a pro-back-to-the-office (and there are tons of people here that are 100% for RTO policies) workers? if they get a majority, they can vote that union workers have to go back and that's it.
1) we get higher salaries to compensate, that's in fact why SWE's are often "exempt" (as well as most jobs making over $80k iirc. We should probably raise that ceiling)
2) I already do that. Maybe I'm lucky, but I've never felt pressured to answer a work message unless there was a legitimate fire.
3) Non-competes are already illegal in California, which I imagine has the most SWEs in the US.
I'm all for unions, but I already see the pushback here. Visa situations definitely suck though.
They correlate somewhat. The more money and demand you have, the less you need to collectively bargain with businesses for basic survival. Unions tend to form out of desperation, rather than some long form insurance plan.
> No more unpaid overtime. The right to ignore work messages outside of business hours. No more noncompetes
This so radically clashes with my experience it makes me wonder if I've had a crazy lucky career or if people have a hard time setting boundaries.
At all the companies I've worked for, I've never once felt like I was obligated to answer a message outside of work hours. Also non-competes are more or less completely unenforceable. And finally... working overtime when you're remote is YOUR choice.
Now all of this is omitting visas. I've never had to deal with that and likely never will. But for US citizens working in tech I don't see how a union helps you at all.