Indeed, sports and entertainment unions probably aren't a good comparison for tech. Other professions like accounting, medicine, law, and engineering might have better examples of cost/benefit, though it's hard to think of another professional industry with the ridiculous level of functional duplication (a million frameworks for everything) in tech.

There's definitely challenges in not turning it into a protectionist thing, but done well I don't think it's a bad thing.

Mentorship programs that bypass the degree requirement are less common, but I made it through without a degree. I would love to see more of them, and more companies willing to help with work-study, but the challenges of that approach are real and may not have an easy solution.

> First, the film unions provide useful benefits (like reasonably-priced health insurance), so most professional actors want to be part of the union. Second, union members are prohibited from working on non-union productions. Additionally, most well-known actors are union members. This gives a strong incentive for a production to be a union production. Third, union productions are prohibited from hiring more than a token number of non-union actors (unless they pay a fine to the union). This gives a strong incentive for productions to only use union talent (which also gives actors another reason to want to be a union member).

Note that by observing important differences between the film and software industries, I'm not arguing that unions couldn't work for the software industry. I suspect this is why I've been downvoted.

I get your point, but I was just using SAG to give a concrete example. The rules are broadly similar for the other film industry unions as well, with similar effects (and other roles have "industry-famous" if not "mom and dad famous" talent).

I suspect you'd get similar dynamics if, for example, a large cohort of the staff/principle engineers plus a bunch of senior engineers in the valley joined the SWE Local 16384. It's probably not necessary that your mom and dad have heard of them.

To be quite clear (and likely this was your point, in which case I agree), if the film/tv unions excluded actors, the effect would be pretty comparable. My friends and family aren't going to see a film because Joe The Sound Guy worked on it just like they aren't going to buy an app just because Collin The SRE worked on it (no matter how famous Joe and Collin are in their respective industries).