Comment by crdrost

Hi! I worked at US Engineering, an MEP subcontractor. This means that when you're building a building, they will hire a general contractor (GC), and that general contractor will be responsible for the overall building and rake in the big bucks—but they'll bid out the MEP -- whether Electrical lines or Mechanical ducts or Plumbing out to a subcontractor, and those margins can get pretty thin, like 5% profit. That needs to cover all of the overhead of office jobs, it needs to cover legal because the final phase of construction is inevitably litigation, etc.

Software wasn't unionized, but the pipefitter were, the welders I met were, unions were a very heavy presence.

> You’ll go from having tight-knit and motivated teams building something awesome together to debating contracts.

Those pipefitters were very tight-knit, never saw them on the job debating contracts. They took a pride in their work that from an outsider seemed kinda strange, saying things like “welp, gotta go help Tyler make his next million.” (Tyler being the CEO and heir of the family business.)

I also know a former teacher who was head of her school's branch of the teacher's union, her teachers were relatively tight-knit, she did describe her particular job as handling and filing complaints and stuff, not so much contract negotiation though.

> Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.

At USE, merit became more important, not less. if you were getting a raise, you had to be able to justify to every other part of the company “hey why is she getting a raise and my people are not.” At Google it was “who can play the perf game best and talk the best talk,” at USE it was “my people made Tyler an extra hundred thousand, what did your people do.” The teacher friend, I didn't ask, but it might be a moot point because during the Bush administration all publibly-funded schooling in the USA was transitioned to hard metrics and student outcomes, so it surely stands against your point but you would also surely say that it's not a representative sample?

> One of the many dope things about startups is the ability (i.e., necessity) to wear multiple hats, building something from 0 to 1. As the job roles become strictly defined, you lose that magic.

So the shop floor did have some very specialized roles. If you are a Master Welder, then the entire rest of the shop floor is basically set up to provide you the illusion that all you have to do to make Tyler money is to show up and weld every piece that is fed to you and inspect it and sign it. Someone else at the Cutter station will make sure that the pipe was cut the right length, someone at Tack-Up will take care of making sure that your parts are already tacked together so that you don't have to hunt around for parts. Stuff like that. But the rest of the folks just wear 10 hats over the course of a day. Like until you have met people who work with their hands like woodworkers, you don't quite have an appreciation for how much freedom one has to just make little tools or racks or a holding enclosure, just welding together some little crane because you got sick of having to sometimes hold this thing for a minute or two while others slid things into place. I want to say at one point they casually dropped “yeah we rebuilt these doors on the loading bay last month, so that we could load another skid into our trucks sometimes.”

Freedom to do stuff, they had! And with teaching, I mean, they load you with so much work that there's no time but aside from the exact minutes of when a class is in your room, the teacher had creative freedom to teach in any way they wanted (and they needed this freedom because any given class has vastly different students with different learning needs). One personal contribution I made: “trashketball,” students could perform tasks on paper to earn the right to throw it into the trash to win either 2 or 3 points off their team. (A different teacher needed an approach to build a kinetic fun activity into their curriculum.)

> Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.

Like I don't think this comment would have gotten me decked or anything if I’d said it to one of these construction workers, but it may have ended several conversations with “yeah I don't work with Chris, that guy's a prick.” I think that the teachers would agree that their hard work and unique contributions are deeply undervalued, but they would blame the taxpayer and the embezzlement-adjacent acts of some school administrators for most of that?