I like the idea of a software union and would love to flesh that out. Its been well documented that the FANNG corps have been suppressing wages for several years. Software is eating the world and if we have a role in that creation we should have a larger portion of the benefits.
I'll go on the record saying I'm pro dev union. Even if its just a glorified professional organization. I'd love to hear the holes in the argument.
The corporations are financially motivated to prevent unionization. If you want a piece of the future you have to be just as savvy.
One tricky bit is if unionizing just causes a massive exodus of development to offshore. Thoughts on that?
You can read the thread and draw your own conclusions. My impression is taken from reading a number of these threads over years; I could be wrong!
I don't like when corporations collude to artificially suppress wages either. Or when information asymmetry is used to keep an engineer's salary low or prevent negotiating higher salaries.
I'll read that discussion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13564440
Arguments often encountered:
* Compensation/mobility is good enough not to need unions. * Workers don't have enough leverage to do anything anyway. * Unions restrict you in undesirable ways. * Unions are shady and corrupt.
I pulled a 5-year-old desktop computer out of storage, bought a new $50 hard drive for it, put my resume on Craigslist (of all places), installed Ruby on Rails and all my development tools, and within two weeks I had a job working from home for $40 an hour. I didn't have to re-certify, renew any licenses, or pay anyone any fees of any kind. I didn't lose access to any tools I relied on in my previous job. My only expense for maintaining my employability was $50. I have a four-year degree only.
I don't know of any other industry where that's possible, and I don't know if it's possible to do that in this industry anymore. I know it is because of the hard work of the open source movement. I've been thinking a lot about how to preserve that level of economic empowerment in software. I don't think the answer is in licenses, but in something like a union (although you are right in that most developers are rabidly anti-union). Perhaps an alternative corporate structure would have the same result, and that's why I decided to start the first for-profit software collective.