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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, l

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.
deleted 10y ago
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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.

deleted 10y ago

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