Who are these "so many developers" you've referenced a dozen times? You've been spending too much time on internet forums listening to rants of the vocal minority. Truth is that most developers are happy and don't need a drastic change, and this can hardly be said about any other profession.
> But it is hard to believe that ANY of us disagree about IP contracts or extended options execution windows.
It's not that people disagree about them, it's that many developers don't suffer from them.
I'm a professional developer and, for me personally, everything in your list is a non-issue. I left BigCo where they were an issue. But I sure can think of a host of issues that I would be concerned about were I part of an organization, one of which being someone else saying what are and aren't issues to me.
If a time comes where a good dev cannot choose where they work and basically negotiate their own terms (e.g. I'm not putting up with any of that stuff in your list and I don't have to in our current market), then unionization may be warranted. But as it stands now, I think many of the issues you listed are avoidable and good devs call their shots.
The HN complaints you hear are an echo chamber and shouldn't be a basis for your opinions on the industry as a whole.
I’m not entirely convinced IP agreements are that big of an issue. The rare horror stories that I’ve heard and read are mostly about really predatory employers (and usually a somewhat legally-unsophisticated employee). “I went to my employer with an exemption to my AoI and they said no” isn’t a thing you often hear programmers grouse about, at least, I haven’t.
It might be a bigger thing in my field. People go work for security companies (and security software companies) because they're interested in the problem space. The stuff the work on in their spare time might not be directly related to their day job, but it's likely to be related to security. People get in trouble over this stuff --- or, more frequently, have to abandon side projects they worked on at their previous employer.
But I mean, it's obvious, right, that not all these issues have to be universal for them to be nucleation points for organizing? As has been photographically established downthread, I don't much care about open offices right now. But I would not be shocked to see a team of developers organizing around getting quiet offices for their startup.
I didn't mean it as some rebuttal to your overall argument - I'm pretty sympathetic to it, for what it's worth. But you did put 'IP contracts' at the top of your chant and then used it as an example of something universal. It seems to have generated a lot of pushback, as well.
My just-so-story understanding of this stuff - if you are a full-time employee in some brainy job, your employer does have some sort of non-zero claim to some kinds of your intellectual output, even when you're not on the clock. To disambiguate this, a standard approach is to let the employer own everything while making it easy for the employee to explicitly exempt personal projects. The onerous-sounding AoI comes with an escape clause and the understanding the employer isn't going to be a butthead about letting the employee use it and that's pretty much exactly how it works out. That way, as your career takes you from a kitten subscription service to a dev tools vendor to Unicron, your npm packages for Pokemon eugenics optimization stay yours.
I can totally see how this might not work that well if you're a specialist in a specialized and funky field like security or how such agreements might seem like utterly evil overreach if you're reading about them on HN from your digital nomad space van parked in Auerbach in der Oberpfalz. But as a general [US/software/SFBA/etc] thing, they don't feel like a top-of-the-list issue.
Probably a bit of debate here, there are for sure some absurd ones I've read about here. I understand why companies feel the need to protect themselves though, even if its wrong.
> extended options execution windows
This is just stupid and I'm not sure anyone thinks the current system is good, not employees, not employers and not even the IRS.
Would you like a link to a prominent venture capitalist saying that he prefers companies he invest in keep their exercise window short to improve retention? Because I can provide that link, but it'll be annoying to dig up, so you'll have to bet me $10 to my $100 to charity that I can't.
FWIW I've only worked for one employer that had a restrictive, overzealous IP contract and invention assignment (others have just had routine paperwork about acknowledging their ownership of things done during work hours, etc.). It was one of my first jobs and I left after six months. They can't keep good talent, and they either get hangers-on who never leave because they can't hack it anywhere else, or people just using it as a short-term stepping stone and are out the door in 6-12 months.
Options do suck, but I guess these are considered less pressing issues because anyone intelligent ignores options more or less completely. If you end up with a windfall from them, that's great, but no one should expect it. Working for equity is for chumps -- demand a decent salary. It's plenty attainable.
All of them but the IP contracts thing, which I agree is bullshit. But I've conversely never had a problem redlining that out of every employment contract I've ever been offered. You do hire an attorney and negotiate at contract time right?
I also don't apply to large fortune 500 companies either, since I know the drawbacks are not worth the pay increase.
Your IP contracts contention is pretty much hogwash. It's FUD trying to scare people when 99.99% of people aren't affected by it.
I know plenty of developers who worked part-time on their startup at well-known SV companies. Two different sets of coworkers subsequently quit, and each sold their company for ~500M. Another one has gotten several rounds of funding. Another one sold their company to an enterprise company for over $1B, and after the earnout period was over, they formed a new company.
There was nothing "onerous" about any of the contracts these people signed. Meanwhile I haven't heard the opposite at all.
"But it is hard to believe that ANY of us disagree about IP contracts "
Frankly, I don't care even a little bit about this.
I am not building any startups that are going to be worth anything. I do stuff for fun, sure, but none of it is going to be worth any amount of money ever.
Thats why I work for a big company who pays me a high salary, because I don't have any world changing, valuable startup ideas. If the big 5 tech company that I currently work for wants to have the IP rights to my worthless side projects, they can go ahead and have them. (They are certainly paying me enough for the privilege)
Or in other words, if I had the choice between "keeping my IP rights", and "getting paid 5k more in salary", I'd take the 5k every time. Or the 1k. Or merely to avoid an awkward conversation with a lawyer.
And I expect that the vast majority of other developers are in the same boat as me. They `might` have side projects, but they aren't kidding themselves about how much they are worth, and are correctly valuing those IP rights at near 0$.
