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Unions are useful for more than just better pay. If that's a concern, charter some new type of union-like organization that doesn't touch salary/wages. One of

by pdkl95 9y ago

Unions are useful for more than just better pay. If that's a concern, charter some new type of union-like organization that doesn't touch salary/wages. One of the most important reasons for unions is to fight back against abusive employment practices that are unrelated to employee compensation. While software development doesn't have anywhere close to the problems mining or factory jobs, we it might be a good idea to address the culture of working long hours with chronic sleep problems. A union could also fight unfair hiring practices like age discrimination or the scandal from a couple years about hiring collusion to between several Silicon Valley companies.

tboyd47 9y ago
I was just having this conversation on HN about a week ago. I think a union for web developers would be a fantastic idea. Like you said, not necessarily for negotiating pay, but that could be part of it. It would be nice if a developer could rise from being paid close to minimum wage to an average software engineer's salary without having to switch jobs 6 times. As an industry we need to address the problem of endemic project failure. Companies who aren't in the software industry generally don't understand how to produce software. Usually it falls on individual developers to teach the rest of the organization how to do things like write stories, build a deployment pipeline, etc. How to trust programmers to do things at their own pace and not resort to cracking the whip all the time. Anyone who's done this knows it's an uphill battle. Usually programmers just choose to leave a dysfunctional org rather than stick around and get punished for trying to do their job. Then you have dying projects full of code no one understands or wants to understand. It would be great if we could come together to take control of our industry and really turn it into a profession. If it's what people want, we could try to engineer a profession where it's reasonable for a developer to expect to hold the same job (or at least work on the same codebase - even as a contractor) for at least 5 years without a major upheaval. Or one where you can expect to use at least some of what you learn in university / boot camp on the job. Or one where workers are expected to have different output levels and they don't fear being let go for not being a natural fast learner like John. Things we don't have that other professions take for granted. All these things aren't going to happen in the current dev culture, but would in fact be beneficial developments not just for employees but for employers as well. If we don't do this type of thing ourselves, companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook will remake the industry in their image as they have done and are doing. This will result in a great worker pool ready for them to draw from, and a broken industry for everyone else.

by pdkl95 9y ago

tboyd47 9y ago

I was just having this conversation on HN about a week ago. I think a union for web developers would be a fantastic idea. Like you said, not necessarily for negotiating pay, but that could be part of it. It would be nice if a developer could rise from being paid close to minimum wage to an average software engineer's salary without having to switch jobs 6 times. As an industry we need to address the problem of endemic project failure. Companies who aren't in the software industry generally don't understand how to produce software. Usually it falls on individual developers to teach the rest of the organization how to do things like write stories, build a deployment pipeline, etc. How to trust programmers to do things at their own pace and not resort to cracking the whip all the time. Anyone who's done this knows it's an uphill battle. Usually programmers just choose to leave a dysfunctional org rather than stick around and get punished for trying to do their job. Then you have dying projects full of code no one understands or wants to understand. It would be great if we could come together to take control of our industry and really turn it into a profession. If it's what people want, we could try to engineer a profession where it's reasonable for a developer to expect to hold the same job (or at least work on the same codebase - even as a contractor) for at least 5 years without a major upheaval. Or one where you can expect to use at least some of what you learn in university / boot camp on the job. Or one where workers are expected to have different output levels and they don't fear being let go for not being a natural fast learner like John. Things we don't have that other professions take for granted. All these things aren't going to happen in the current dev culture, but would in fact be beneficial developments not just for employees but for employers as well. If we don't do this type of thing ourselves, companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook will remake the industry in their image as they have done and are doing. This will result in a great worker pool ready for them to draw from, and a broken industry for everyone else.