Why unionizing IT workers won’t work.
It has long puzzled union leaders as to why it is difficult to get IT workers to unionize. In the past few weeks, it has become very clear to me. Conditions at my current employer became very difficult. Our immediate engineering manager was able to be overruled by any other manager in the company in order to “accelerate communications”. In short, the rank and file software engineers could be retasked from some critical paired task to work on some cosmetic issue for our front web site, or some such thing. This frustrates not 1 but 2 people.
In addition, people in the department were not replaced when they left. In fact, no attempt was made to look for a replacement. Senior management wanted to get rid of some unwanted people and wanted to reduce the size of the department. Fair enough. unfortunately, their expectations of the department did not shrink but grew instead. The result is that there were twice as many critical projects as developers.
Oh, and everybody is being managed by crisis.
So what happens. In a bad economy, you put up with it because, well, it’s work. After all, the work is only mentally stressful, not physically dangerous. However, when the economy picks up, everybody who can find a job does so. Finding a job is very much an informational task, one which software engineers and IT people in general exceed.
The result has been that we have lost an amazing manager, web applications architect, 2 senior software engineers and 2 expert BSP developers. This doesn’t count the people who left because they were bored. As such, our company is on the verge of collapse due to lack of manpower.