This is a space that unions fill well compared to for-profit recruiting agencies. The organizations give engineers control and leverage in hiring, and can help them up-negotiate. They also allow employers to hire from pools of skilled talent.
Whereas with recruiting agencies, the customers are employers, not the candidates. Incentives are not aligned to give candidates control.
People at the recruiting agency usually get paid a commission as a percentage of the first year of the hiree’s salary (not taken from your paycheck, but just in general). Which means, it is in their interest to get you as high of a comp as possible. Which also means that I dont have to bs around with the recruiter about my salary expectations or anything like that. I give them the upper range of what i want, they tell me either “sounds good” or “they are easily willing to pay more, so why not try $X instead” or “they cannot pay that much, but there is this other company that we work with that can offer you as much.”
And if you work with one recruiter consistently, it gets even easier, because now that the recruiter knows my total comp expectations, she pre-filters opportunities for me and only contacts me if there is a position she is aware of that pays at least as much as I want or more.
Of course there are downsides too, for example, the limited choice of companies that the recruiting agency is working with at any given time, so i still have to find some opportunities and interview with those companies on my own. But as a supplementary option, working with a good recruiting agency has been quite nice for me.
P.S. The type of a recruiting agency i am talking about is the one that is focused on a specific sector (in my case, fintech/quant), so it might be a completely different story for a “generic software dev” recruiting agency.
Beware: this is not universally true. What you typically see is that it leads to closing as many candidates as possible. A recruiter can make more by closing 2 candidates at 80% of max comp than 1 candidate at 100% in the same time.
This is a well known behavior in real estate sales, which have a similar commission structure.
I am saying that because I’ve been working with her for at least 3 years now, and I am yet to take a single offer from the companies she set me up with (either due to them getting cold feet last second or simply due to me not passing some of those interviews or me declining due to some red flags with the companies). If it was all just about high volume for her, it would have been in her interest to drop involvement with me after the 3rd unsuccessful attempt to set me up with a fintech company.
Even worse, real estate pays both sides so realtors are heavily incentivized to get their buyers to purchase from their own sellers so they can get both sides of the commission. Instead of paying them 3% to act on your behalf and do a bunch of leg work they get double and now they can do less work and aren't strictly working for your benefit.
Working on commission just leads to wanting to make a deal happen. Even ignoring the time aspect of it, if a recruiter has much better odds of making a placement at 80% max comp compared to 100% max comp, the 80% is still objectively better. Why risk not closing the deal when the expected return is negative?
Collective bargaining is inherently about eliminating competition between workers. That is, it creates a labour monopoly to balance out a labour monopsony. That might (might!) be a good thing for autoworkers. It would be an unmitigated disaster for software engineers, and the tech sector in general.
People who write code are unbelievably productive compared to just about any other job function, and software engineers (who we'll define as people who write code for tech companies) are even more so. Part of eliminating competition between workers is making sure that nobody works harder than anyone else. That would be devastating to the productivity of software engineers, which would make them less valuable to tech companies. That would lead to a decline in salaries, and general stagnation of tech.
Another aspect of preventing competition is seniority. One of the archetypes of the tech world is the wunderkind—the brilliant kid fresh out of school that rockets to the top. A union would tell that kid, "sorry, you'll have to pay your dues as a junior engineer for 5 more years, then you'll be eligible for promotion. In the meantime, we'll give that job to cwp, he's got the required seniority."
Just think how this would affect tech companies. Sorry, you can't pay more to attract the best. If you're really careful about interviewing, you might be able to find some people with both skill and seniority, but it'll be tough because smart, ambitious people have all gone to Wall St or whatever industry has the best opportunities.
A yet every movie star in the US is in the same union as B-movie and infomercial actors.
> Another aspect of preventing competition is seniority.
Weird, considering pro-athlete unions regularly help kids out of college quickly become multi-millionaires.
> One of the archetypes of the tech world is the wunderkind—the brilliant kid fresh out of school that rockets to the top.
Weird, considering unions have been at the forefront of education, apprenticeships and training that helps kids out of school rocket to the top, the same apprenticeships and training that companies refuse to fund themselves.
> Sorry, you can't pay more to attract the best
Weird, considering SAG-AFTRA regularly helps movie stars up-negotiate multi-million dollar contracts.
