I don't work in games, but I am a software developer and a member of the Communications Workers of America. I've also taken leave to help workers in games organize.
I'm seeing a lot of ideological takes that are disconnected from the reality of unions with software developer members today. If anyone has questions about the CWA or game worker organizing campaigns, I'll do my best to answer.
This thread is filled with so many anti-union takes that you have to wonder if they are paid bots.
If you assume that most of the crowd that visits this website works in tech or tech-adjacent fields, how can you be against an entity whose main objective is to safeguard and work for your interests over your employers? Unfathomable that people are willing to do so much against their own best interests. Or...they are bots.
Unions are complicated. Generally speaking they are good for workers, but when they start focusing on job security over compensation and build in seniority-based advantages, the leverage unions have can be wielded against consumers and fellow workers, not just against employers.
“Unions are unequivocally good” is about as naive as “unions are unequivocally bad.” It’s always a question of how the union prioritizes their power, and that can lead to bad practices in the long run.
If you care about fairness, generally, and not just “what’s good for me personally” you don’t have to look hard to see powerful unions acting in bad faith.
On the other hand, it's far more voluminous to catalog the list of corporations acting in bad faith and abusing their employees than finding the abuses of unions.
Firing managers for egregious behavior only makes the legal case for the victims. That's also why cities don't fire bad cops, but instead keep them around until pending litigation is resolved.
If “who is worse” is a relevant metric, the question of unions would not be complex. Again, though, this is an entirely naive view of what is a very complicated reality.
The very obvious reason that corporations are “worse” is simply that they have more leverage. The idea that “leverage is likely to be abused” is a much more thoughtful heuristic for the paradigm.
But unions have never existed in a vacuum. And without the context of why they came about, that is from corporations abusing employees, it's easy to say "Unions are complex" when the world in which they exist is far more complex than unions are and perhaps far more vile.
I'm generally pro-union. Don't think that just because I criticize them that I don't think they're generally a good idea. The problems I'm pointing to are general problems of democracy in general. Incumbents tend to ignore future generations well-beings when it comes to current generations ability to negotiate.
The point I'm trying to respond to is: "This thread is filled with so many anti-union takes that you have to wonder if they are paid bots."
I think there are plenty of reasons why normal folks are anti-union, and generally, it's because different sets of workers are in different positions and have different perspectives.
Generally speaking, if there were some kind of "Workers Bill of Rights" built into organized labor law, preventing these abuses, there would be much stronger support for unions generally.
You want to be a longshoreman? Tough shit, they aren't any jobs for you as a longshoreman... and it is a total coincidence that the extremely high paying gigs for longshoremen tend go to the children of existing longshoremen. Not to mention their effort to shut out technological improvements that are standard in most other countries now.
You want medical costs to go down? Tough shit, the professional organizations for medicine have managed to artificially limit the number of med school students and residencies.
If there were limits on what unions could to stifle competition within their own industries, if there were limits on the extent of job security for poorly performing union members, if there were legitimate rules that meritocracy has to be the rule, not the exception, then I think the vast majority of Americans would start clamoring for more union membership. What we currently see is a lot of good work, but also a lot of fiefdoms being established and locked down.
There are unions that protect workers from firm's abusive practices. There are also unions that protect lamplighters job from the "tyranny" of the electric light bulb, and make everyone poorer in the process.
> The very obvious reason that corporations are “worse” is simply that they have more leverage. The idea that “leverage is likely to be abused” is a much more thoughtful heuristic for the paradigm.
If you enjoy thought terminating clichés, I suppose.
Corporations, in general, have a very different set incentives and ways they can wield power and ways that people outside of their power structures can interact with them.
It's the same issue when people try to claim a corporation having the power to do X is the same as a democratic government having the same power. It's not.
> ...how can you be against an entity whose main objective is to safeguard and work for your interests over your employers?
This is like asking how people can be anti Google when Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
I personally lean pro-union, but it takes very little empathy to understand that the people who are anti-union don't believe that the unions will serve their stated purpose.
I think you underestimate the anti-union propaganda of the last century. Any working class individual against unions parrot the same surface-level talking points predicated on their own limited understanding of labor. In a way they are bots; the alive variety.
I don't think they're bots, since I've seen the sentiment on HN for a long time. Instead, it reminds me of the idea of people seeing themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". If you see yourself as being part of the capital class in the future and think strong unions hurt the capital class, one might be against them.
If not careful, it can come across as elitist: the notion that unions are for people who are replaceable—people that need unions.
I wonder though if those absolutely certain that they thrive in a meritocracy will have second thoughts if/when Corporate decides they're replaceable by AI.
You can do the math yourself if you so choose. If you don't want to or disagree with the results, well, it's not my job to educate you, as you've said.
Not when all of the marketing of LLMs is touting their abilities to do the exact thing and that is what investors are being presented.
If it is as you say, then eventually the house of cards will crumble. Then we can finally go back to work and quit being inundated with needing to use AI for everything.
This study and the studies it relies on are based on O*NET descriptions of jobs in the Bureau of Labor Statistics Taxonomy. Here is the entry for Software Developers:
The "exposure" of a job is based on the degree to which its "tasks" can be substituted/augmented by LLM-based tools. Some example tasks are:
- Develop or direct software system testing or validation procedures, programming, or documentation.
- Determine system performance standards.
They are predicting roughly one quarter of U.S. software developers will lose their jobs over the next two to five years.
If you believe that one could quantify how much time could be saved on each of those "tasks" across all software developers as a whole with current and near future LLM-based technologies, you should take these results seriously. They are doing so using data about actual LLM requests and using LLMs to compare the content of those requests to the O*NET task content.
If you don't find that methodologically plausible - as I don't - you shouldn't take the final outputs of their study seriously.
There could of course be other convincing arguments for pending degradation of the software developer labor market that don't rely on this type of task analysis.
I think these arguments tend to reach impasse because one gravitates to one of two views:
1) My experiences with LLMs are so impressive that I consider their output to generally be better than what the typical developer would produce. People who can't see this have not gotten enough experience with the models I find so impressive, or are in denial about the devaluation of their skills.
2) My experiences with LLMs have been mundane. People who see them as transformative lack the expertise required to distinguish between mediocre and excellent code, leading them to deny there is a difference.
I was at 2) until the end of last year, then LLM/agent/harnesses had a capability jump that didn't quite bring me to be a 1) but was a big enough jump in that direction that I don't see why I shouldn't believe we get there soonish.
So now I tend to think a lot of people are in heavy denial in thinking that LLMs are going to stop getting better before they personally end up under the steamroller, but I'm not sure what this faith is based on.
I also think people tend to treat the "will LLMs replace <job>" question in too much of a binary manner. LLMs don't have to replace every last person that does a specific job to be wildly disruptive, if they replace 90% of the people that do a particular job by making the last 10% much more productive that's still a cataclysmic amount of job displacement in economic terms.
Even if they replace just 10-30% that's still a huge amount of displacement, for reference the unemployment rate during the Great Depression was 25%.
Not sure that's what I was getting at. People in camp 2 don't think an LLM can take over the job of a real software engineer.
It's people in camp 1 that I wonder about. They're convinced that LLMs can accomplish anything and understand a codebase better than anyone (and that may be the case!). However, they're simultaneously convinced that they'll still be needed to do the prompting because ???reasons???.
One explanation is that some think we might be getting to the limits of what an LLM can reasonably do. There's a lot of functions of any job that are not easily translated to an LLM and are much more about interacting with people or critical thinking in a way LLMs can't do. I'm not sure if that's everyone's rationale but that's my personal view of the situation. Like the jobs will change but we likely won't be losing them to AI outright.
To the original poster: I don't know you, but based on your posting history I am worried about your well being. Please talk to someone in person about how you're feeling, even if you feel okay (or better than okay).
I’ve read primary text excerpts from Hegel and some secondary sources too, and already knew that he didn’t write in that style, but the general idea that many forces in life develop themselves dialectically (the antithesis sometimes being expressed as alienation) is very similar in concept.
That a myth has developed around the terminology and methodology is persuading, but also there’s nothing wrong with a programming library to call itself Hegel.
I don't work in games, but I am a software developer and a member of the Communications Workers of America. I've also taken leave to help workers in games organize.
I'm seeing a lot of ideological takes that are disconnected from the reality of unions with software developer members today. If anyone has questions about the CWA or game worker organizing campaigns, I'll do my best to answer.
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