Technology

Omg, this. The part time legal thing is happening to me right now.

I’m building a small app for a (multimillion dollar) company. Nothing major. I tell the project manager: “hey, you guys need a EULA to publish in the app store. You can use the std apple one or write your own. Tell me what you want to do.”

This woman comes back to me with: “what do you think we should do?”

Like b#%^!, I don’t know! Why would you want me to tell you how define the legal relationship between you and your customers?

After some prodding, she forwards the request to legal and sends back a DRAFT EULA asks: “Can you review this?”

NO. I cannot review legal documents. I’m horrendously under qualified for that!!!

/end rant

And help each other unionize!!!

Stealth mass unionize the company with a matrix community that helps coordinate everybody

Also making private unionized competitors to compete with stock non-unionized companies. The former will every time especially by making a better product, and take care of employees and customers

Let's fucking goooooo!!!!!!

I like dancing to businesses that value AI more than employees bankrupting themselves and being replaced with better. Let them be companyless and us owning all our stuff including our homes

You get people pushing for unions because you deserve unions.

The tech industry is such a shitshow right now they deserve unions.

Depends on how you define "the industry." The tech workers are the ones driving the actual production of goods and services, so it's pretty reasonable to say that the workers are the industry.

Obviously this headline assumes that CEOs, managers, and investors are "the industry" in question, but I don't necessarily agree.

Time to go to private unionized companies for existing and new alternatives to existing ones

There's no central engineering order either.

Forming new professional bodies takes time, administration, and some kind of governance structure. There aren't a lot of grey-beards that have a bunch of spare time for organizing that. Also, historically, most IT people have seen themselves as "lone wolf frontiersmen" and the rate at which the industry has changed has made any kind of professional certification obsolete very quickly. Legal statutes, the frontiers of medicine, the best practices and techniques for pipe joining and bricklaying, etc. advance very slowly by comparison. Mature industries are much easier to unionize on average. IT is spectacularly immature (in multiple ways) by comparison so it's very hard to create a professional body to represent tech workers.

Would it be good if we had something like that? Yes. Is it going to be easy to build, hell no. A better model might be the development of independent tech co-operatives, with distributed ownership. If a bunch of senior software engineers with some spare cash to pool creating a bunch of major tech competitors with a co-operative ownership model might actually serve the industry much better than the centralized corporate model we find ourselves subject to, AND provide a basis for developing industry unions, but the closest the industry has to something like that at a large scale is... well Valve, and even that's not a true co-operative.