With 25 years experience, the other thing is environments vary a lot, even within a single company. Things can be dysfunctional for lots of reasons, sometimes due to individual incompetence at various points in the hierarchy, or just systemic/cultural issues that no one has the vision or influence to identify and fix. When you're young and inexperienced, but technically brilliant, it's easy to miss the forest for the trees of what's really going on on the human side of things of any large group effort.

One of the things I value the most about working at startups in my early career is that it allows relatively "junior" folks more exposure to the big picture, and thus stay grounded in reality and not swayed by all the random narratives that are floated around in the corporate world. No matter how smart you are, or how honest and well intentioned the intent of the speaker, it takes experience to be able to parse through these and understand when and how they are relevant to your individual work. I see a lot of folks over the last 15 years who got hired into big tech during boom times, never got anywhere near the critical path of the business, and were exposed to all manner dysfunction by ambitious but incompetent social climbers who swelled the ranks of anything with the whiff of success. In these types of environment, people who just want to do good software engineering work can easily get swept into various dead end buckets of learned helpless, rest-and-vest, burnout, etc.

This leads to a more fundamental observation.

That if unionization is so cleary net positive for most workplaces, then it wouldn’t need any sustained agitation campaigns in the first place.

As any company that unionizes would near automatically gain a huge competitive advantage.

> That if unionization is so cleary net positive for most workplaces, then it wouldn’t need any sustained agitation campaigns in the first place.

> As any company that unionizes would near automatically gain a huge competitive advantage.

No, your "observation" has a fundamental flaw: There's no general "net positive for most workplaces," because different groups have different interests.

Unionization is a "net negative" for certain groups (managers, owners) and a "net positive" for others (employees, if done right). That's why there are sustained agitation campaigns against it.

We (especially those with an entrepreneurial bent like so many of us frequenting this site in particular) have so effectively been sold the illusion that class no longer exists that most have us have genuinely become blind to the idea that a company's interests (i.e. the interests of owners, shareholders, the board, investors, whatever - maximizing profits or ROI) and a worker's interests (e.g. a sustainable, stable and reliable income with potential for career advancement providing access to better pay/perks) usually run directly opposite to each other. Class conflict is inherent to the employer-employee or owner-worker dynamic. You can merely afford the luxury of pretending it doesn't exist when it's in their interest (i.e. doing so aligns with their goals, usually in the short-term) to "pamper" you - and that era may be drawing to a close within our lifetimes.

Every single worker is ultimately disposable. If you think your employer is disposable to you, that's not because you're special but because so far you've been extremely lucky. It is far easier for a company to replace a worker than it is for a worker to replace the company they work for - we just tend to see the "inability to find a new job" as a personal failure (i.e. bad performance at the job of "finding a job") whereas we take the existence of job vacancies for granted as a normal part of the market and maybe even a positive indicator for "growth" (which we define as desirable even if it's artificial or unsustainable).

It should also be pointed out that it's not just the money aspect. Managing people is difficult, managing people in a stressful situation is really difficult, add a dysfunctional culture (especially if that culture is "imposed" from above) is a pain in the proverbial. Which means managing in these situations is hard work.

Add on top of that that a largish number of managers just plain suck at their job, so being in a union can be useful to push back against either lazy or incompetent managers.

Because there are far more people who leave their manager than leave their job.

This seems like a tautology, of course there can not be a general rule for all workplaces.

By definition with sufficiently seperate interests, then anything (or nothing) goes.

Tell me you've never read history without...etc

Yeah we do…? political power can also be traded in markets, subject to market forces, etc.

Maybe not 100% of the time in 100% of societies, but certainly more than zero in every society I’ve ever heard of.

This is an interesting take, but I have a slightly different take. My ding dong company pays everyone including myself, salaries that are way too high. They gave ne a 30% raise I didn't even ask for or expect. We get a contract to do X, which say should take a team of 5 folks. However, we can only staff the contract with 3 folks because our salaries are too high. Now, we're all working 80hr weeks and stressed to the max because we really need more fresh minds on the challenge.

Now, we're in a contract lull, so some of us are only charging part time (75%), while actually working overtime.

It's bananas.

The solution seems obvious. Decrease salaries and increase company stock offerings. Then, if you and your colleagues care to work harder and deliver outstanding product, your stock value will rise over time and you'll be a.) more wealthy than taking 'dumb' money, and b.) more physically and mentally healthy.

Simple conclusions

a) the people who have the stock now want to keep it and be more wealthy

b) they don’t have much regard for your physical or mental health

People do stuff like skim, see 'decrease salaries' and click down without really thinking or even reading it all. It can be kinda random and not worth worrying about.

I think it’s an interesting comment. Hard to not take that kind of thing personally though.

I take it extremely personally, after all, I'm talking about voluntarily decreasing my own salary to achieve better work life balance in the present.

However, decreasing salary != decreased total compensation.

Increase equity shares + decrease salary = improved work-life balance now and much healthier retirement in the future.

Nah, there are people that run companies here, too. Many of them drink the cool-aide.

It happens, I wouldn’t sweat it

> In my experience as a software engineer rounding out 6 years now, what I have observed in myself and others is that the work pressure that leads to burnout in SWEs is largely self-imposed.

This is how control works in our society. It's true for all people.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han explains it well in "The Burnout Society".

> the work pressure that leads to burnout in SWEs is largely self-imposed

Nothing happens in a vacuum and this "self-imposed" work pressure often happens within the a company culture that is either intentionally or accidentally highly demanding of individuals. The "self-imposed" is a false front for enforced expectations from colleagues, managers and clients.

We're all in unique situations and you can say if you don't like it then don't work there. However the hustle and start up cultures are viral and spread throughout the industry. Just look at all the talk of Elon Musk & his Twitter and Doge employees working 100 hours weeks and sleeping at the office. Regardless of politics, there are many people who talk about this insane, unhealthy and inefficient level of work as a good and worthy thing. It's the Puritan work ethic myth. In reality the majority of the benefit of this work does not go to the individual doing the work, instead they pay a heavy cost with their quality of life.

I'd add 3: most of us really like this stuff. Sometimes I get pinged in the evening for some issue. I have the freedom to say I'll check it out in the morning, or on Monday. Sometimes I do, but often I'll look at it. There's definitely a little bit of 2 in there, but mostly it's because checking it out is fun, and solving it is rewarding.

I try not to overdo it. You can still burn out from that sort of thing even if you like it. But as long as it's not excessive, I enjoy the occasional "Sorry it's late, but are you around to take a look at this?"

I've legit never known of a place that hires SWEs that matches this description.

Except maybe the sweet gig SWEs got at Twitter before Musk.

No wonder you'd feel imposter syndrome if you'd landed a gig that good. Anyone would.

this doesnt apply to 90% of programming jobs so im not so sure the money growth expectation disilusion angle is right.

I generally assume it is due to lack of agency.