He also provides examples of unionized industries where "star performers" have no wage limits -- that the only limit is in the minimum pay for a position. And he points out the many ways a union could support programmer rights (for instance, the right to own personal projects), and kill damaging practices like stack ranking.

We need something. That much is clear. Whether it's a professional guild or a union, I'm not sure. But the status quo is awful for most of us. [2]

[1] https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/10/13/it-might-be-...

[2] I'm actually one of the "1%" who is quite well compensated, but I think more of us should be compensated based on our abilities. And I do want to get rid of the "we own your free time projects" rules everywhere; I consider those to be morally reprehensible.

Edit: Added "unionized" to the second paragraph to make it clear what I meant.

[1] https://animationguild.org/ [2] https://animationguild.org/about-the-guild/organizing/

No offense, but I think that statement is ridiculous. You admit you're in the top 1% of income earners in the US and you choose to use the word "awful" for your predicament?

My point is, the "plight of programmers" comes nowhere close to "awful" when you actually look at what some workers have to put up with.

Practices like "stack ranking" hurt all of us when they result in good people being fired or reprimanded, though.

Normally organizations need to compete to survive, with the more ineffectual falling off. You can't necessarily have unions compete for members, because the power of the union is in how many members it has and fractioning them would diminish their authority.

I believe Germany is also highly unionized.

So maybe we should learn from them ?

And BTW in all those countries one thing about those unions is that they are highly responsible - they understand the market realities and understand that people need to justify salries or else there would be layoffs.

[1]http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

Downvoting informed people is the worst way to express disagreement. It contributes nothing, and makes your side look bad.

Many of the steelworkers unions in the early 80's went out of their way to try to get people retired so that the younger people would still have jobs. They also worked very hard to get people transferred to other sites to reach the point where they could retire even if it meant sacrificing some salary.

Or, for something more recent, many of the unions involved with Hostess took several rounds of cuts before finally standing up and taking a hard line that eventually led to the bankruptcy. And, it looks like Hostess is going to be better off because of it.

The downvotes are well warranted because he spewed propaganda instead of citing real facts.