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And when people advocate for programmers unionizing, I don't see why we'd be any different. There'd be people employed doing X, a programmer would make somethin

And when people advocate for programmers unionizing, I don't see why we'd be any different. There'd be people employed doing X, a programmer would make something to automate X, and "our" union would be trying to save their job.

RangerScience 10y ago
This is like when people talk about the AI. The AI will do this, the AI will do that... The AI doesn't exist. People will make it. That is when you know what it will do. If we make the union, we can make plenty of reasons and ways for it to be different. Whether or not those result in a difference, is not very predictable. Our day jab is literally understanding, predicting, and building complex systems out of ideas. Why would we be unable to make a union with a reasonable - even likely - chance of not developing the same problems these (much) older unions have?
- jlg23 10y ago
  > The AI doesn't exist. People will make it. But it will require much less people to build the AI. And that's the only relevant point when stepping into the investors' shoes.
- viraptor 10y ago
  1. Organisation is created with good ideas. 2. Politically motivated or terrible at management and long term view people get to the top of organisation. 3. That organisation now protects the status quo, even though it's in everybody's interest to move on. Tell me you've never seen this story... I've worked with managers who would absolutely go for hiring more people to continuously do the same stupid task rather than improving the process. If they were protected, it would be a very sad place to work.
gingerbread-man 10y ago
Just throwing in another reason why programmer unions don't make a lot of sense: licensing. It makes sense to license electricians, crane operators, doctors, lawyers, and many other professions who do safety-critical work. Only a very small minority of programmers work on software that could actually hurt someone (at Boeing, Toyota, etc...). There's no reason to create a legal barrier to entry for programming.
- viraptor 10y ago
  I don't disagree about licenses not making sense for programmers, but there's more ways to hurt people than physically. Think of people who lose money to fraud, get their personal details published, or get stuck in some process that costs them time and money just because they ended up in an unexpected state of a large and complicated system.
- stonemetal 10y ago
  There are Medical health records in Postgres, doctor's office software running on windows and linux, Barcode readers at the local pharmacy, safety critical code in a git repo. If you are going to draw a line around safety critical software the dependency graph is much larger than you might think.
- llukas 10y ago
  You forgot only about: - banking - online shopping - medical data handling - other sensitive data handling - medical devices (pacemakers etc) - IoT
- SapphireSun 10y ago
  Why would licensing be a barrier to unionizing? Surely a smaller licensed community is easier to unionize, but the whole idea is getting a lot of (skilled or unskilled) people together to bargain collectively when bargaining individually would be ineffective.
- jaza 10y ago
  There is no general licence for a "construction worker". There are specific licences for things like "tower crane operator", "intermediate rigger", "advanced scaffolding erector". Similarly, there would never be a general licence for "programmer". But some day there probably will be (and indeed probably should be) specific licences for things like "have back-end access to personal medical data", "modify source code of nuclear reactor control software", and "install networking hardware via which credit card details are transmitted". It's not about creating a barrier to entry for a whole profession. It's about licencing people to work in specific situations where there are specific risks, such as privacy risks, public safety risks, and risk of fraud.
abandonliberty 10y ago
Call it a 'professional association', like doctors, lawyers, and engineers. The real problem is wealth concentration. Unions and professional associations are one way for the working class to push back when the society they live in is failing to do so. It's the wrong tool, not addressing the root cause, has implementation challenges, and will create problems in the future. But the ship is sinking right now. Since the 1970s.

RangerScience 10y ago

This is like when people talk about the AI. The AI will do this, the AI will do that... The AI doesn't exist. People will make it. That is when you know what it will do. If we make the union, we can make plenty of reasons and ways for it to be different. Whether or not those result in a difference, is not very predictable. Our day jab is literally understanding, predicting, and building complex systems out of ideas. Why would we be unable to make a union with a reasonable - even likely - chance of not developing the same problems these (much) older unions have?

jlg23 10y ago
> The AI doesn't exist. People will make it. But it will require much less people to build the AI. And that's the only relevant point when stepping into the investors' shoes.
viraptor 10y ago
1. Organisation is created with good ideas. 2. Politically motivated or terrible at management and long term view people get to the top of organisation. 3. That organisation now protects the status quo, even though it's in everybody's interest to move on. Tell me you've never seen this story... I've worked with managers who would absolutely go for hiring more people to continuously do the same stupid task rather than improving the process. If they were protected, it would be a very sad place to work.

gingerbread-man 10y ago

Just throwing in another reason why programmer unions don't make a lot of sense: licensing. It makes sense to license electricians, crane operators, doctors, lawyers, and many other professions who do safety-critical work. Only a very small minority of programmers work on software that could actually hurt someone (at Boeing, Toyota, etc...). There's no reason to create a legal barrier to entry for programming.

viraptor 10y ago
I don't disagree about licenses not making sense for programmers, but there's more ways to hurt people than physically. Think of people who lose money to fraud, get their personal details published, or get stuck in some process that costs them time and money just because they ended up in an unexpected state of a large and complicated system.
stonemetal 10y ago
There are Medical health records in Postgres, doctor's office software running on windows and linux, Barcode readers at the local pharmacy, safety critical code in a git repo. If you are going to draw a line around safety critical software the dependency graph is much larger than you might think.
llukas 10y ago
You forgot only about: - banking - online shopping - medical data handling - other sensitive data handling - medical devices (pacemakers etc) - IoT
SapphireSun 10y ago
Why would licensing be a barrier to unionizing? Surely a smaller licensed community is easier to unionize, but the whole idea is getting a lot of (skilled or unskilled) people together to bargain collectively when bargaining individually would be ineffective.
jaza 10y ago
There is no general licence for a "construction worker". There are specific licences for things like "tower crane operator", "intermediate rigger", "advanced scaffolding erector". Similarly, there would never be a general licence for "programmer". But some day there probably will be (and indeed probably should be) specific licences for things like "have back-end access to personal medical data", "modify source code of nuclear reactor control software", and "install networking hardware via which credit card details are transmitted". It's not about creating a barrier to entry for a whole profession. It's about licencing people to work in specific situations where there are specific risks, such as privacy risks, public safety risks, and risk of fraud.

abandonliberty 10y ago

Call it a 'professional association', like doctors, lawyers, and engineers. The real problem is wealth concentration. Unions and professional associations are one way for the working class to push back when the society they live in is failing to do so. It's the wrong tool, not addressing the root cause, has implementation challenges, and will create problems in the future. But the ship is sinking right now. Since the 1970s.