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0 pointsroguecoder3y ago0 comments

That sounds like you feel pretty helpless. Personally, I find that I have numerous avenues of negotiating power, even without unionization:

1. Do I recommend the company to my network? I can make it a lot cheaper or more expensive to hire.

2. How do I spend my time? All my technical choices will make certain changes easier down the line, and others harder. I work hard to understand the business context & help those choices serve our shared goals, but the emphasis there can be on "shared".

3. How much do I streamline my own work? I can work efficiently, or I can wait for that build to finish and that PR to be approved and merged before I move on to the next thing. This can be a particularly effective way to incentive investment in a platform team & build tools, if I'm not allowed to just fix them myself.

4. What do I collaborate on with my coworkers? We can pick priorities we care about, and negotiate together for specific improvements. I've gotten more vacation time, better computers, bigger screens, paid on-calls and time to fix bugs all just by talking with people about what's hard about our work.

5. Insisting on pushing improvements to open source software upstream if we are going to use the libraries at all. The company could decide it wants to write everything entirely in house, but as long as we are using open source software I personally only make changes to it that we are going to push back to the community.

And I am sure there are more: those are just the ones I've used recently.

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ClumsyPilot3y ago

Yhose are all nice when negotiating working from home or something similarly minor - but when it comes to foundamental business model, these things are unlikely to move the needle.

brailsafe3y ago

That's pretty much what I was thinking while reading it. The difference between doing your work, and doing your work better than you're expected, is often unrewarded with any measurable security, probably because they're non-functional requirements and it's hard for some manager to sell their boss on the RoI. It's similarly hard to measure, if they'd even let you in on that data, how much of a minor influence you had on the business financially. Sales people meanwhile can just say "I sold this company on a $2m contract for services over the next 2 years"

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