Minor detail... They didn't lose their jobs. NYT article about it.

Did they get tired of the union, or the constant pressure from management to not join or support it?

What is it you're talking about?

Corporate shills claiming victory and deriding unions as evil in 3.. 2..

I don't think we're really talking about who gets credit on a published paper. We're talking about someone in the employ of a research institution or higher learning who works on software that enables others' research and allows them to publish research that they otherwise would not be able to. We're talking about someone receiving credit for the work that they've done with regards to their own professional accomplishments. Traditionally the only work that's been of any significance to their performance reviews or evaluation for a tenured position is publishing research papers; the point of this discussion is to ask why their work on software that enables research "doesn't count" because their names are not on a published paper. Essentially, that work has no value in that discussion, and that isn't right. Creating this software should also count as an accomplishment by those individuals for the purposes of measuring their performance. The fact that it doesn't at the moment is most likely due to bias on the part of those doing the evaluations; any time someone can give someone a review or evaluation that doesn't rate a raise or promotion/tenure, they do so, right or wrong.

I agree that shit programmers are going to be shit programmers no matter what, but another problem is shit managers that use the methodologies of agile/scrum/kanban/whatever to further isolate themselves from accountability by blaming everything on the developers. If you're an MBA who can barely run a toaster, yet you're in charge of directing a software project of significant complexity, the shit rolls downhill until your once-good developers are now burned out husks who are indistinguishable from shit programmers.

I actually like Agile, we implemented it fairly well at my previous job. The thing I like about Agile is that it defines everyone's role and discourages people from going outside them. We had an MBA who thought he could make every decision related to a project whether he was qualified to make it or not (and for most of them, he wasn't.) Labeling him as the "product owner" and defining his role to be limited to adding tickets to the backlog was better than him just trapping all the devs in their cubicles and talking their ears off about how they had to implement his stupid-ass decisions, with no accountability or documentation.

Plus, there was one moment of pure smackdown that was quite possibly the best moment at that job that I ever had. We were in a retrospective meeting, looking at a particular ticket. While the page in question was being opened up, he pointed at a misalignment on the home page and said "When are we going to fix that?" A few of us said, nearly in unison, "Did you add that to the backlog?" He gave us all a sour look because he knew he'd been caught not doing his job, when his core competency was not being held accountable for anything.

This, so much this. "Devops" (which should be "developers who know some sysadmin skills" and "sysadmins with some programming skills", but is usually "developer and sysadmin are the same person") and "Full-Stack Developer" (instead of "developer", you have "developer-DBA-QA-XYZanything else we can make them do") are code for "Let's hire one guy to do 2 or 5 jobs instead of hiring 2 or 5 people like we would do if we were less insane and less cheap." With devops, you get pressure from your lead dev or architect about why you're not closing more tickets or writing more code, and you get pressure from the idiot walking-haircut MBA running the show for not releasing each week with the features that are the exact opposite of what they asked for the week before. You can't code if you're doing sysadmin work, and you can't do sysadmin work if you're coding. But they try to make you do it anyway, because they can't "increase headcount".

Believe it or not, there is a lack of knowledgeable engineers out there in any given domain that are willing to work for minimum wage.

FTFY. There is no shortage of STEM workers, there is a shortage of STEM employers that are willing to pay market salaries. They'd rather go without an engineer than pay one enough to support themselves.

Because anyone with a clue will want fair compensation so they dont hire them.

FTFY. There's a difference between value and cost, and most of the time the only thing people think about is cost.

Without "government interference" in private enterprise, you wouldn't be alive.

Or, I'm sick of people bashing php for things that aren't structural/language issues.

php isn't garbage, lots of code that's written in php is garbage.

What has the employer done wrong here? They fired him. They don't legally need a reason or a justification. Anyone can be fired at any time with no notice, justification, or recourse. Making a scapegoat out of someone is not illegal.

There is no winning if he files a wrongful termination lawsuit. He will lose the suit, and further destroy his employability. Being blamed for a data breach is one thing (he's probably unemployable just because he got blamed for it, right or wrong) but if an employer sees that firing someone will be harder than they think it should be, they won't touch him.

Unless you're a member of a "protected group", and/or you can demonstrate explicitly illegal behavior (like wage violations), you will not win a wrongful termination lawsuit. Being made a scapegoat is not illegal behavior on the employer's part. In the eyes of the law, there is no injury to the former employee here - you can be fired for any time for any reason, or no reason at all. That is what "at-will" employment means. The burden is on the former employee to demonstrate the true reason why they were terminated, which is nearly impossible to prove when the former employer has possession of any documentation that would tend to incriminate them (and records get "accidentally" destroyed all the time).

The theory is that "at-will" is fair because just as your employer can end your employment at any time with no notice or justification, you can walk away from a job with no notice or justification. The truth of the matter is that losing your job is much more damaging to the individual than an employer losing an employee that it has deemed a liability (or wants to make a scapegoat of).

This guy is radioactive anyway. He was a scapegoat for people above him in the hierarchy fucking up. This is what people in power that fuck up do - instead of admitting they don't know everything and are not perfect, they pick a drone that they can spin a narrative around (out of whole cloth, basically) and sell it to the angry mob who doesn't understand the issues involved. Yes, it basically ends someone's career, but the important thing is that it isn't their career like it should be.

So, since his career in IT is over, it doesn't matter if he blows the whistle at this point - he'd never get a job in IT again no matter what.

And I take issue with the fact that a terminated employee should be punished further for telling the truth about a situation. Any time someone is punished for telling the truth, we all lose.