I couldn’t put this book down once I started reading (released on August 15th, 2023). I ended up diving into the multiple references and resources mentioned while reading.
The following are notes from the book. As always, if you like what you see then I highly suggest picking up a copy of this book for yourself. If nothing else, this is a good blueprint and reference to have in your library of knowledge.
I’ve broken these notes down by chapter. They are not exhaustive but hopefully of interest (or at least enough to pique your curiosity).
Introduction
Layoffs wrecked the software industry at the start of 2023 and the trend continues in 2024. In fact, 2023 almost mirrors the same experience in the 2001 dot-com crash (yep, I was there for that as well). All told, this forced thousands of engineers out of work which flooded the job markets.
This definitely struck a chord with me since these kinds of issues are why I formed this site — and collective — back in 2010. I’ve been convinced, for a long time, that we all need to band together to fight for the craft and improve the engineer experience while still delivering a better world for our customers (and humanity in general). Profit is important but not the primary goal. Instead, the mission and purpose of what we are doing should be the driving force. This mode of thinking is exactly the opposite of what we see in the industry now where late stage capitalism is reducing labor and squeezing every penny in order to increase profit and share holder value.
On the bright side, many software engineers have started gathering to fight for a better future in the form of collectives and unions. This is what this book is about.
Just Work
In the The Real World of Technology by Ursula Franklin she talks about those who plan and those who are subject to plans. Inherently, this creates a hierarchy of power where there are those who make the decisions and those who must adhere to those decisions. To borrow from Drive, by Dan Pink, this yields low autonomy instead of empowering us to have a seat at the table and collaborate together. I should also state that I don’t think of us (engineers/makers) as serfs working for the fiefdom. I think of us more as engineer entrepreneurs as laid out in End of Jobs by Taylor Pearson. Sadly, this is the opposite of how most people think.
[T]he last twelve months in the tech industry have been, frankly, tumultuous. The global pandemic created an unprecedented demand for online goods and services, which dramatically buoyed the tech industry’s profits. By the end of 2021, the industry was booming; it literally couldn’t hire quickly enough. Tech companies were opening new job positions faster than nearly any other industry, competing aggressively on salary, benefits, and other perks to attract qualified candidates. Heck, Amazon even doubled its salary caps at the start of 2022, raising the annual base pay for salaried workers from $160,000 to $350,000.
Towards the end of 2022, things took a darker turn as Putin invaded Ukraine, supply chains were disrupted, cost of living rose, and layoffs went rampant. Case in point:
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Amazon: 10,000 employees.
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Meta 11,000 employees.
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Microsoft: 10,000 employees.
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Google: 12,000 employees.
💡 Bookmark Layoffs if you want current and/or historic stats.
Even worse, the underrepresented lost major gains in diversity through these layoffs. In fact, the layoffs have a caused a complete reversal.
This is a supply and demand problem and, right now, the supply is much higher than the demand so companies are happy to push you around or wait for the next person in line to say "yes" to your "no".
We’re left with a relationship with our jobs that’s mired in uncertainty, unpredictability, and a lack of guarantees. It’s a relationship defined by a wildly uneven distribution of power between employers and the people who work for them
[W]orkers affected by these layoffs didn’t have any say in how much notice they were given, or in the benefits and support they’d receive after leaving. That power sat exclusively with the two companies’ respective bosses.
Wouldn’t you like to have a hand in defining the benefits you receive at work? After all, our labor—yours and mine—built this industry. We should have a seat at that table. But at the moment, we don’t.
In Our Strength, Safety
[O]nce a technology achieves institutionalized status, it reshapes people’s labor—and people’s lives—on a dramatic, industrial scale. A technology may promise liberation at first—but inevitably, people are captured by it. Exploited.
A few examples:
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The printing press.
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The sewing machine.
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The assembly line.
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The internet.
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Artificial Intelligence.
We keep evolving, which is great, to do more with less. Yet, our lives haven’t improved. Like being able to work four day work weeks, focus on our craft, enjoy our friends and families more, etc. Instead we keep toiling away spending the same (or even more) hours to raise profit margins for profit’s sake.
So how do we solve this? For starters, we can band together through strength in numbers. Here’s a few examples:
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Employees protesting GitHub’s contract with ICE.
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Collective Action In Tech: A resource of knowledge for protecting yourself.
What Is A Union?
A union is a group of workers who, through organization and collective action, fight for a better life.
Jane McAlevey puts it even more simply: "Unions are conduits for worker demands and fairness in the workplace."
[E]mployers exploited this lack of legal protection, fighting ferociously and viciously to preserve their own unilateral power in the workplace.
There’s not a lot of room for imagination within tech work under capitalism.
The steps are simple but there is footwork to get the gears moving along with sorting out the legalities:
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Form a union.
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Form a Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). Example (Kickstarter).
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Work with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) which serves as a regulator for labor related issues in the United States.
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Setup channels of communication.
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Campaign to expand your outreach and mobilize further.
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Go public and become officially recognized.
Every Tech Worker Deserves a Union
There are two types of unions you can form:
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Majority: A simple majority when when most workers form the union and is recognized by the employers. Even workers who voted "no" are still represented by the union.
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Pre-Majority: Not recognized by the employer and don’t have bargaining power (although, companies can choose to recognize them). If there is any leverage by the union (i.e. critical work, sizable presence, etc), that could be used as influence as well. Employee’s who oppose the union are not represented by the union.
in the United States, labor law firmly favors employers.
And since the moment the NLRA was passed, business-aligned interests have been working to weaken or eliminate it. They’ve dedicated herculean amounts of time, money, and resources to whittling down the law’s legal protections for workers. They first reaped a return on their investment with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which dramatically undercut the scope and protections of the NLRA. And in the intervening decades, the campaign to chip away at American labor law has only picked up steam.
[M]uch of this resistance is illegal.
…but this gets even more nefarious:
Anti-union consultancies are an astonishingly big business— Amazon alone spent over four million dollars on these firms in 2021
Here are a few examples of functioning tech unions worth looking into:
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Times Guild: The New York Times tech guild.
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CfA Workers United: The Code for America union.
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Union Collective Bargaining Agreement Strategies in Response to Technology
Tech Solidarity, Forever
[M]any of tech’s most powerful investors are talking openly about how human labor is dramatically overvalued in the tech industry—that there are simply too many tech workers. In no particular order:
Marc Andreessen, the noted venture capitalist, recently opined that "the good big companies are overstaffed by 2x. The bad big companies are overstaffed by 4x or more".
Nat Friedman, the investor and former CEO of GitHub, says on his homepage that he believes "many tech companies are 2-10x overstaffed".
A venture capitalist named Brad Gerstner wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, demanding that Meta reduce its head count. As Gerstner put it, "It is a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley that companies ranging from Google to Meta to Twitter to Uber could achieve similar levels of revenue with far fewer people".
A billionaire investor named Christopher Hohn wrote a similar letter to Alphabet’s CEO, demanding the company take "aggressive action" since "the company has too many employees and the cost per employee is too high".
After Alphabet conducted a massive round of layoffs, Hohn wrote again to demand Google reduce its head count even more—by another 20 percent.
You don’t have to look far to find more examples of this refrain, sung by voices that are almost entirely male, predominantly white, and very, very, very, very, very wealthy.
I definitely don’t condone the devaluing of human intellectual labor or treating us like automatons pumping out widgets on an assembly line. Yet, I admit there are many teams who are too large and inefficient. Nearly always, this is the result of the Mythical Man-Month problem and eventual entropy due to lack of rigor.
I don’t believe any of these investors really care. They’re not watching to see how well the tech industry’s layoffs are "working," because they’re not angling for a better, more productive tech industry. They’re reacting to rising interest rates, and to a stock market that soured dramatically on the tech industry in 2022
Once again, if we banded together, we could steer this situation in a direction that is profitable but also enriches people’s lives while giving them a life worth living for.
Conclusion
After reading this book, I can’t stop thinking we can do better beyond forming unions. Like build an association, guild, and/or governing board that isn’t specific to one company but spans across the entire software industry which can take action against bad actors including companies and/or individuals that don’t adhere to professional standards, ethics, law, and so forth. This association — or even collective — could function like the IEEE but with teeth to protect the rights of software engineers while also providing a place for everyone to level up, hone the craft, and be leaders and influencers in their own right. This constantly reinforcing circle of positive effect or flywheel — to borrow from Turning the Flywheel by Jim Collins — could not only make us better engineers but the industry itself. A win-win situation for all.
These ideas aren’t new as we can look to history and other countries for additional examples:
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Bourse du Travail: The translation from French means: labor exchanges. Formed by the working class with a focus on education and mutual aid but is not longer as powerful as it once was in the early 1900s.
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Trade Union Congress (TUC): Has played a significant role in advocating for workers' rights, better working conditions, and fair wages.
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Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB): The translation from German is: German Trade Union Confederation. Represents over six million workers across various industries and has been influential in shaping labor laws and policies.
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Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT): The translation from Spanish is: Unified Workers' Central. Known for its active role in advocating for workers' rights, especially during Brazil’s transition to democracy.
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Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU): Played a crucial role in the struggle against apartheid and continues to advocate for workers' rights and socioeconomic transformation.
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Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM): One of the largest Mexican labor unions focused on worker’s rights and labor policies.
I realize this is easier said than done and having a centralized authority has it’s own pros and cons too. I don’t have all the answers but definitely has me thinking and hopefully has you thinking as well.