“Let” assumes they want to do mentoring and training. Which a lot of people do, but not everyone.

I'm curious if you are relating these two ideas or if you're treating them as separate. Is there a connection between unions and mentorship?

Giving folks a path into IT via apprenticeships would be a lot easier with a union to support/enforce career growth/mentorships. Unions could also help create more developer co-ops that can offer onboarding and retirement.

Somewhat unrelated, I'd love to see some kind of code dividend for folks where you keep earning money from code you wrote (that hasn't been rewritten). I think the IP assignment stuff we all have to sign is ridiculous when it creates so much value. We are signing away our right to future profits.

That's literally what we're being paid so much for, and what those stock options we're showered with are for. The idea is that developers build future value of the company, so instead of being rewarded in commission like sales people, we get stock grants.

They can do that without unions, not sure why those are a necessary condition for mentorship.

I’m definitely not going to trash unions, big Billy Bragg fan here, but mentorship and training of less senior people is already basically table stakes expectation for staff+ engineers at any competent tech company.

I actually think it’s overemphasized on the internet, if anything. Staff+ engineers should still edit (I don’t say “write” because “delete” is even better) code. Otherwise what’s all the training for? Getting the senior- engineers up to “mentoring” roles, to train even more senior- engineers, …?