> It’s better than the risk of trying to carry on long term short-staffed
Companies don’t feel that way. They feel they can just ramp up the workload on existing employees “until we can hire more.” What are they going to do, leave? Where do they think they’re going to go? They’ll be met with the same situation at another company, except they’ll be on the other side of the table this time.
If there are companies with money, no employees, and the urgent desire to hire them, that breaks this equilibrium. The overworked employees jump ship to the startup, the incumbents become more desperate and finally relent.
At some point, your employees don't just magically work harder. And then you fail to meet customer demand resulting in lost potential revenue. By the time this happens you're so far in the hole it's challenging to climb out.
This is the (well, yet another) result of going for decades with such weak labor protections.
If the answer to "What are they going to do?" is "strike", or "leave and take a massive severance payout because that's what their union negotiated in the contract that specifies you can't overwork them by more than X amount", then the company no longer has that abusive option on the table. They have to hire someone to fill that role.
I'm recently interested in the question of unions, and I'm wondering, if there any ICT unions somewhere? Or, at least, attempts of creating such?
I was also thinking that it can be difficult to officially unite many developers worldwide. But can it be possible to get data ownership back? E.g. collectively crawl job openings from LinkedIn, and leave some personal reviews on them, at some independent platform?
Companies don’t feel that way. They feel they can just ramp up the workload on existing employees “until we can hire more.” What are they going to do, leave? Where do they think they’re going to go? They’ll be met with the same situation at another company, except they’ll be on the other side of the table this time.
If there are companies with money, no employees, and the urgent desire to hire them, that breaks this equilibrium. The overworked employees jump ship to the startup, the incumbents become more desperate and finally relent.